By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
The criminal case against Patrick “Tate” Adamiak is the first time the government has ever applied the National Firearms Act to a bunch of gun parts that the ATF still allows for unrestricted sale without requiring any federal paperwork or even ID, which somehow led to Adamiak’s 20-year federal prison sentence, his attorney Matthew Larosiere said in a document filed this week with an appellate court.
Larosiere is asking to present his case to the entire U.S. Court of Appeal for the Fourth Circuit, after a panel of three appellate judges heard the case, because “the panel opinion overlooks and misapprehends material facts and controlling law, and because the questions presented are of exceptional importance.”
Larosiere has three main legal issues:
- “The panel overlooked or misapprehended the undisputed record evidence that all items underlying Appellant’s convictions were non-functional relics requiring material alteration and fabrication, not mere assembly, to become NFA-subject weapons. This renders the evidence legally insufficient.
- The panel misapprehended and failed to address Appellant’s preserved Second Amendment challenge, short-circuiting the Bruen test and treating the challenged conduct as categorically valid without conducting the required inquiry.
- The panel insisted that a bill of particulars would have cured the notice issues in the indictment, but it is a settled rule that a bill of particulars cannot save an invalid indictment.”
Larosiere then put the main issues of this case into layman’s terms.
“These issues are exceptionally important because the government is applying the statutes here at issue to items the government has—for decades—explicitly permitted the unrestricted commercial sale,” he wrote. “There has been no intervening change in law, and in fact the very same items Appellant was charged with are still routinely and openly commercially sold.”
For those following this case, that is maddening. The very items that put Adamiak in prison are still sold online. Most don’t even require ID for the sale. As a result, everyone is now at risk.
Not only did the government’s charges result in a 20-year sentence for Adamiak, who had been an active-duty U.S. Navy sailor accepted for SEAL training, they threaten to “criminalize collectors and dealers for possessing inert historical artifacts that are both beyond the scope of the charged statutes and clearly entitled to constitutional protection.”
In other words, if this case is allowed to stand, anyone with gun parts could be subject to arrest by the ATF.
The appellate court panel, which heard Larosiere’s argument last month, failed to note that every single evidentiary item that Adamiak was charged with was “indisputably inert as possessed.”
“The government presented no evidence tying any charged item to a specific definitional pathway. Instead, it invited conviction on the sweeping premise that inert relics and display pieces were either now or could eventually be fabricated into NFA-regulated weapons,” Larosiere wrote in the court document. “None of the items here—cut-up parts, drilled-out training aids, or lawfully held launcher receivers—met any operative definition. The government’s case depended entirely on post-seizure alterations and machinations of the ATF.”
No real evidence
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 heavily reworked by the ATF.
The government’s theory again depended on post-seizure fabrication by ATF. In its testing, the agency assembled these receivers with 40 mm training barrels and cartridges that were never possessed by Adamiak, and only then did it achieve test-fire capability,” Larosiere wrote. “The ATF’s reconstruction created—for the first time—the NFA configuration the government attributed to Adamiak.”
Not one item, for which Adamiak is serving two decades behind bars, was a weapon until the ATF reworked it by adding parts. Therefore, Larosiere said, there is only one legitimate conclusion.
“Because no item in evidence could reasonably be a ‘weapon’ as possessed by appellant, and each required fabrication to do so, the evidence was legally insufficient as a matter of law,” he wrote. “The proper disposition is reversal and entry of judgment of acquittal.”
Massive legal concerns
If the charges against Adamiak are allowed to stand, anyone who owns any legal guns or gun parts could be subject to a search warrant and arrest by the ATF.
Anyone with a legal semi-auto could be charged with illegally possessing a machinegun. Adamiak, it should be repeatedly stressed, faced multiple machinegun charges for legal semi-autos.
Anyone with a toy gun could also be charged with unlawfully possessing a machinegun. The ATF turned Adamiak’s toy STEN submachinegun into a real submachinegun by adding a real STEN receiver and a real STEN barrel. Even though it could only fire one 9mm round after the massive alterations, the ATF called it a machinegun.
Anyone who legally sells any firearm parts could be subjected to an ATF search warrant and arrest, as was Adamiak.
In fact, everyone is now at risk by the ATF.
Apparently, based on Adamiak’s case and several others, all the ATF needs is an informant’s suggestion that you did something wrong and they can kick down your doors, point guns at you and your family, and charge you with federal felonies even though you committed no actual crime.
That is why this case is of such massive importance.
Adamiak’s case is the first time the ATF has ever charged anyone with violating the NFA for a bunch of legal gun parts. Unless action is taken quickly, based on ATF’s own sordid history, it will definitely not be the last.
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