Patrick "Tate" Adamiak was a Navy sailor working to become a Navy SEAL and had a side hustle selling lawful gun parts and accessories. He also owned some guns of his own, and a couple of replica or demilled items, meaning those items flat-out didn't work.
And now he's serving 20 years for perfectly legal guns and non-firearms.
His ongoing legal saga has been frustrating to behold, in part because this is something that could theoretically happen to any of us. Nothing he had was an actual machine gun--which he was charged with possessing--nor was the demilled RPG an actual RPG.
And his attorney is dismantling the arguments against his client.
Larosiere destroys the government’s evidence, for which Adamiak is starting the third year of his 20-year sentence, specifically, PPSh-41 parts kits, inert RPG launchers and M-79 and M-203 launchers.
As to the PPSh-41 parts kits, which the government said were machineguns, Larosiere wrote, “The undisputed record establishes that the seized item was nothing more than a cut-up box of surplus parts—an inert collection of metal fragments lawfully imported and sold for decades as non-firearms.”
“ATF’s own witnesses conceded that the parts—whatever they were—were cut into multiple sections, that it could not chamber or fire a cartridge, and that substantial welding and machining would be required before any firing sequence was mechanically possible,” he wrote.
The RPGs, he noted, were “plainly marked ‘TRAINING AID DUMMY.’ Both seized RPG tubes were sold and possessed as inert training aids, bore drilled holes, and lacked any fire-control assembly.”
“The government’s expert admitted that to “fire” a projectile, ATF replaced the handgrip and trigger, inserted a 7.62 mm training insert, and fired a bullet—a caliber wholly unlike a rocket projectile,” he wrote.
Like the RPGs, Adamiak’s M-79 and M-203 parts were also heavily reworked by the ATF.
And let's understand that if something requires heavy reworking, it's not the thing in the first place.
The government's efforts with the replica Sten weren't quite as extensive, but they still had to do a significant amount of work to make it fire a single round. Further, the way the magazine had to be seated, it could never fire more than one round at a time. They'd turned a supposedly full-auto Sten into a single shot because an actual magazine wouldn't seat properly in the replica's mag well.
On every level, a cursory look at the so-called evidence makes it clear that Adamiak did nothing wrong.
What makes this case so terrible is that what happened to Adamiak could happen to any number of other law-abiding Americans. Boxes of parts aren't illegal to own. They sell them all the time, and in a disassembled state, they're perfectly legal under the law. They're not firearms without a receiver. I know the Biden administration wanted to change that, but it couldn't, so those are still legal.
And Adamiak is rotting in prison, not for something not just he didn't do, but for a crime that no one committed. He didn't go down for someone else's illegal acts. The only people who broke the law were the ATF.
Every single thing that he was charged with was easily explainable and perfectly legal.
The fact that he's still sitting in a cell is an affront to the very idea of justice in this country. He should have been freed well before now. The fact that he hasn't is morally reprehensible.
Unfortunately, that's the ATF for ya.
And I bet those agents still wonder why regular gun owners absolutely despise them and give them dirty looks at SHOT Show every year. It's an absolute mystery.
To be fair, I'm sure there really are some agents at the ATF that are as horrified by this as we are. They don't like what they just saw and don't believe it's remotely just.
But they still work for the same agency that manipulated literally every piece of evidence available in order to send an innocent man to prison and destroy his military career, just to not look like they got it wrong, so that's all on them at this point.
