He lied while trying to buy a gun. Now, former SC trooper, councilman gets prison time

Kerry Trent Kinard, a former South Carolina Highway Patrol trooper, Bamberg County councilman and Jasper County magistrate, was sentenced Wednesday to 18 months in prison for lying on an application at a gun store to buy a pistol.

Kinard, 50, was sentenced by U.S. Judge Mary Lewis during an hour-long hearing at the federal courthouse in Columbia.

“If I could give you more, I would,” said Lewis, who also gave him a $5,500 fine and required him to undergo a mental examination.

Lewis said she gave Kinard the maximum sentence that she could because he had disobeyed judicial orders to stay away from his spouse in an alleged domestic violence situation and was told he could not own guns.

“When a court says you got to do (something), you got to do it,” Lewis said. “You have a judge who says you don’t need to have a gun, and then you go out and try to buy a gun.”

Kinard, an Air Force veteran, was a police officer with the Allendale Police Department and a S.C. Highway Patrol trooper. He also served as Jasper County magistrate before gaining a seat on the Bamberg County Council in 2012, though he lost his reelection bid last year. And he also was a sports information director at University of South Carolina-Salkehatchie.

Last December, Kinard tried to buy a pistol at a Columbia-area gun store and filled out an application in which he falsely swore that he was neither under a felony indictment nor restraining order. His attempt to buy the Taurus 9 mm handgun at Sportsman’s Warehouse 155 on Piney Grove Road was unsuccessful.

It is against federal law for people who are charged with felony crimes or under restraining orders to buy a handgun from a federally licensed firearms dealer.



Commercial gun stores, federally licensed firearms dealers, are required to get basic information from prospective buyers, including data from driver’s licenses and whether they have been indicted or convicted on felony charges. They must also query an FBI database about whether the prospective purchaser has outstanding felony charges or a restraining order.

If no answer is received, the gun shop must delay the purchase for three days.

Kinard pleaded guilty to the gun charge last April.

He declined to speak when asked by the judge whether he had any comment.

“Some people should not have guns, and I think you are one of them,” Lewis said. “There is a reason why certain people in certain circumstances should not have access to weapons.”

Ex-councilman heads to prison

At the time Kinard tried to buy the handgun, he was facing felony charges of first-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor, attempted criminal sexual contact with a minor, two counts of criminal solicitation of a minor, first-degree assault and battery and two counts of dissemination of obscene material.

The charges stem from incidents between 2008 and September 2020, according to the S.C. Law Enforcement Division, which arrested Kinard.

Kinard also was under a restraining order brought by his spouse, according to an ATF affidavit. A state judge had put the order in place to stop Kinard “from committing further acts of abuse or threats of abuse” against his spouse, the affidavit said.

At his sentencing hearing Wednesday, Kinard’s wife told the judge that she and her children “have a huge fear of having him harming others and himself. My heart sunk when I heard the news he was trying to get his hands on a gun.”

She called Kinard “a professional liar who craves attention,” and said he used to tell her “where on his family’s property he was going to put me.”

“It is frightful to think what would have happened if the gun laws were not in place,” she told the judge. “Please make his punishment hard so he will realize his actions belong to him.”

When Kinard tried to buy the gun, the gun store received no answer to its query and did not proceed with the sale. Soon afterwards, SLED and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives got involved. Kinard was arrested the next day.

A sentencing memo in the case, written by assistant U.S. Attorney Elliott Daniels, said, the “defendant lived as if the rules didn’t apply to him.”

“Despite holding numerous positions of public trust, according to two state grand juries, his sexual abuse of children lasted for years, and a South Carolina Family Court determined his violence towards an intimate partner warranted a protective order,” Daniels wrote.

Daniels elaborated in court Wednesday, telling Lewis that South Carolina’s domestic violence rate is among the highest in the nation and to allow someone like Kinard to have a gun should be out of the question.

“You can’t take a chance,” Daniels said. “What makes Kinard’s crime of lying on his application to buy a gun worse is that he tried to obstruct the ATF investigation into the failed purchase.”

Kinard’s lawyer, Bakari Sellers, told the judge that Kinard has not been tried yet and there is another side to the “sensationalized novel” presented by the prosecution.

“He was never a danger to anyone because he wore an ankle monitor,” Sellers told the judge, adding that most people who put false information on a gun application are given a second chance and not sent to prison.

Sellers told reporters after the hearing that Kinard was trying to buy the gun for two reasons: it was for sale and he had received some online threats.

Kinard, who was denied bond after being arrested on the gun violation last December, has been in jail 10 months.

He will get credit for the time served and spend the remainder of Lewis’s 18-month sentence in federal prison.

Making false statements on an application to buy a gun carries a potential maximum charge of 10 years. Kinard, however, has no criminal history and has yet to be tried on the state charges against him. Federal sentencing guidelines limited Lewis to a much lower sentence.

Kinard’s trial on the state charges is scheduled to start Nov. 29, Sellers said.

This story was originally published October 20, 2021 at 4:06 PM with the headline "He lied while trying to buy a gun. Now, former SC trooper, councilman gets prison time."