By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
The Second Amendment Foundation and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms are among a half-dozen gun rights organizations which signed onto an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court Monday urging the high court to review the case of Patrick Tate Adamiak v. United States, challenging his conviction for gun law violations under the Biden administration.
Joining SAF and CCRKBA are the National Rifle Association, California Rifle & Pistol Association, Second Amendment Law Center and the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus. They are represented by attorneys C.D. Michel and Anna M. Barvier at Michel & Associates, Long Beach, Calif., and Konstadinos T. Moros at the SAF offices in Bellevue, Washington.
Adamiak’s plight has been detailed in TGM reports by SAF Investigative Journalism Project editor Lee Williams, who has covered this story for nearly two years.
As noted by a SAF news release, “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.”
But there are many questions about the evidence and whether anything Adamiak did was actually illegal.
“Our petition covers the legal arguments well,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “and it only scratches the surface of this complex and unjust saga..”
Adamiak’s ordeal especially highlights the damaging flaw in this Court’s insistence on waiting for sufficient “percolation” before finally confirming which arms are protected by the Second Amendment, the amicus brief explains.
“Tate Adamiak’s situation reflects the most extreme example of the human cost of this Court’s ongoing reluctance to resolve pressing Second Amendment issues,” Gottlieb said. “The Supreme Court has been slow-walking the Second Amendment long enough. The case against Tate Adamiak is a disgrace, and we have to wonder how many more such cases might occur while the country waits for the nation’s highest court to hand down a ruling which prevents this sort of thing from happening again.
“We understand the desire to not upend cases currently sitting in lower courts,” he observed, “but many of those cases are gathering dust because the courts do not want to act. It’s time for the Supreme Court to set things in order.”
“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.”
The 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.”
