Patrick "Tate" Adamiak should either be a Navy SEAL right now or have at least given it his best shot. Instead, he's sitting in a prison cell, just a few years in on a 20-year sentence. The ATF says he violated numerous gun laws, including possessing an RPG.
But the Second Amendment Foundation is asking the Supreme Court to hear Adamiak's case, and there's a good reason for that.
Let's start with the press release sent out by the SAF:
The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and its partners have filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court urging review in Patrick Tate Adamiak v. United States, a case involving a decorated Navy veteran sentenced to 20 years in prison for possessing cut-up gun parts and two inert RPG-7 training dummies.
Adamiak enlisted in the United States Navy at 17 years old, serving in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the Panama Canal. At the time of his arrest, he had orders to report to BUD/S and had completed the first phase of training on his way to becoming a Navy SEAL. He was also a gun collector who sold legal gun parts until a paid ATF informant falsely reported that he had a Mk-19 grenade launcher. After a search of his home and subsequent trial, Adamiak was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.
Editor of SAF’s Investigative Journalism Project, Lee Williams, has followed the case closely and has written more than 40 stories on Adamiak and his plight. The full list of stories can be found here.
SAF is joined in the amicus filing by the National Rifle Association, California Rifle & Pistol Association, Second Amendment Law Center, Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
“Lower courts continue to distort Bruen by turning the ‘plain text’ step into a restrictive Goldilocks test that lets the government evade its historical burden entirely,” said SAF Director of Legal Research and Education Kostas Moros. “If cut-up gun parts and inert training aids are being regulated as ‘firearms’ under the NFA, they are presumptively ‘arms’ under the Second Amendment and require historical analogues. Patrick Adamiak should not be spending decades in prison because, among other abuses, courts refuse to apply the Supreme Court’s precedents faithfully."
SAF's brief focuses on the Second Amendment aspects of the case, including what constitutes an “arm,” why the plain text of the Second Amendment is implicated, and why Bruen's historical analysis may not be avoided.
“This case highlights the human cost of lower courts’ refusal to faithfully apply Bruen,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “A Navy veteran is behind bars over inert gun parts, yet his Second Amendment claim was never even heard on the merits. SAF and its partners are committed to defending the right to keep and bear arms against this kind of judicial abuse, and we believe the Supreme Court must intervene.”
Over at our sister site, Bearing Arms, I've been following the case as well. I wrote about it when Adamiak was convicted, wrongfully assuming that if a jury found him guilty, he was likely guilty. However, as Williams continued reporting, it became clear just how egregious the conviction was. There's absolutely no grounds for these convictions.
Replica guns and training aids were treated like live weapons. Semi-automatic MAC-10s, which are rare and collectible but completely legal to own without NFA paperwork, were treated like machine guns. The ATF even took a replica STEN gun easily obtainable over the internet right now, heavily modified it so it could fire a single round--it couldn't fire more because the modifications made it so the magazine was jammed in so far the action couldn't cycle--and called it a machine gun under the law.
It should never have resulted in a conviction, but as Williams' reporting makes clear, the judge in the case was clearly on the ATF's side and wouldn't allow experts to debunk the agents' claims.
There's a reason a gun rights group is urging the Supreme Court to hear this case. It's not even that the laws are unconstitutional--they are, in my opinion, but that's neither here nor there--it's that this is such an egregious miscarriage of justice that the entire nation faces the possibility of such benign activities resulting in decades in prison simply because the judge and law enforcement decide you belong there.
