Via Gun Owners of America,
In 2022 during the Biden Administration, federal agents arrested Patrick “Tate” Adamiak, a U.S. Navy sailor with no violent history or criminal record.
Tate’s crime? He was a firearms enthusiast.
If that sounds like an exaggeration, it’s not. Biden’s weaponized DOJ charged Tate with violations of the National Firearms Act for having collectible firearm parts at home. Importantly, NONE of these items was an actual “firearm” under the NFA – at least, not until ATF agents tampered with evidence before trial, leading to one of the most unjust convictions we at Gun Owners of America have ever seen.
United States v. Adamiak is a case that everyone should be talking about.
That’s because, right now, Tate is languishing in federal prison, serving a ridiculous 20-year sentence that is longer than sentences received by most violent criminals.
And to make matters worse, the U.S. Supreme Court has just declined to hear his case.
That means if DOJ doesn’t ask that Tate’s sentence be reduced at an upcoming hearing, then a presidential pardon is Tate’s last shot at freedom.
We’re calling on the Trump Administration to do the right thing and reverse this Biden-era miscarriage of justice.
The story of Patrick “Tate” Adamiak begins well before his 2022 prosecution, and it’s worth telling here.
From an early age, Tate was fascinated with firearms, and he was as patriotic as they come. At the age of 17, Tate enlisted in the U.S. Navy, and eventually became a Master-at-Arms – the Navy’s equivalent to military police. And, by the time he was 27 years old, Tate had been accepted to BUD/S – the selective training program to become a Navy SEAL.
Throughout his young adult years, Tate began amassing a collection of firearms and historic military memorabilia. At the height of his collection, Tate owned around 150 firearms, and his goal was to one day open a military-themed museum.
Unsurprisingly, Tate easily turned his hobby into a side hustle during his time in the Navy. He formed an LLC – Black Dog Arsenal – and soon became a top-500 seller of collectible firearm parts on GunBroker.
His specialty was inert, nonfunctioning military arms and replicas, including what are known as “demilitarized” or “demilled” parts kits.
Nothing Tate possessed was an actual, working machinegun.
To the extent Tate had any firearm parts, they were frames or receivers in a destroyed, cut-up state – significantly and permanently modified not to function as firearms, appealing only to collectors.
In other words, Tate sold nonfunctioning gun parts, which federal law does not regulate.
But that didn’t stop Biden’s anti-gunners from trying to ruin Tate’s life. And during the Biden years, they found their opportunity.
In 2021, ATF paid a 20-time felon $8,000 to act as a confidential informant and help secure a conviction against Tate. This informant was cooperating with authorities in an effort to reduce punishment for his own firearm felonies.
Apparently, Tate’s business success had caught ATF’s eye, and they wanted to charge him with something – anything. This wasn’t a one-off prosecution. In fact, it sounds eerily familiar.
We’ve seen precisely this sort of anti-business weaponization by Biden’s ATF before.
GOA has previously covered the story of Tim Durkin, a successful entrepreneur and GOA member who the Biden ATF targeted, all for helping rural gun dealers stay afloat during COVID.
But back to Tate’s case.
ATF’s confidential informant tried to purchase a machinegun from Tate, repeatedly asking him to break the law. And each time, Tate refused, explaining that he did not have a Federal Firearms License, and so he could only sell parts.
Unfortunately, Tate’s interactions with ATF’s confidential informant did not end there.
It didn’t matter that Tate had refused to break the law. ATF decided that Tate was a criminal; ATF just had to make him one. Ultimately, Tate ended up selling the informant some cut-up receivers of firearms that once had been machineguns.
Of course, these saw- or torch-cut items could not accept parts to fire fully automatically – they couldn’t fire at all. They were just inert collector’s pieces.
But that was good enough for the ATF.
In an affidavit later filed in court, one of the ATF agents on Tate’s case claimed that each of these cut-up receivers was in fact an unregistered machinegun under the National Firearms Act.
ATF’s theory? Even though the receivers had been destroyed, they hadn’t been destroyed enough.
That’s right – even though the receivers had been sawn apart with a “single cut through them,” ATF claimed “each could be readily made/restored into an operational machinegun,” and so each receiver legally was still a machinegun.
But there’s just one problem with ATF’s legal theory. It’s found nowhere in the statute that Congress enacted.
Let’s take a look.
The National Firearms Act defines “machinegun” as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger. The term shall also include the frame or receiver of any such weapon, any part designed and intended solely and exclusively, or combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun, and any combination of parts from which a machinegun can be assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of a person.” 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b).
So, the statute covers not only functioning machineguns but also weapons that “can be readily restored” to fire fully automatically.
But the statute does NOT say that a weapon with a “single cut” through its receiver is readily restorable. In fact, the statute says nothing about how many cuts a receiver must have before it no longer qualifies as a “machinegun.”
Even so, ATF has provided its opinion – not the law – on what constitutes “destroying” a firearm. In its publicly accessible NFA Handbook, ATF states that:
“The preferred method for destroying a machinegun receiver is to completely sever the receiver in specified locations by means of a cutting torch that displaces at least one-quarter inch of material at each cut location. ATF has published rulings concerning the preferred destruction of specific machineguns.”
For many machineguns, this “preferred method” includes three or four receiver cuts. But again, this is just ATF’s “preference” – it’s not the law.
Yet under Biden’s anti-gun administration, it would seem that violating even the arbitrary preferences of bureaucrats is enough to land you in prison.
Amazingly, it didn’t even matter that Tate wasn’t the one who cut the receivers in the first place – he bought them like that, from reputable military surplus wholesalers.
Those well-intentioned wholesalers never thought there was a problem, and neither did Tate.
But under ATF’s approach – “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” – there was no avoiding ATF’s vindictive prosecution.
Ultimately, based on ATF’s subjective, entirely made-up reading of the statute, the Biden DOJ executed a search warrant at Tate’s house in April 2022.
There, they found Tate’s firearm collection and business inventory, including legally imported, deactivated WW2 relics, surplus military parts kits, and replica collectibles. ATF even seized Tate’s money and antique currency collection, claiming it was the proceeds of illegal activity.
This is a common tactic by the feds – seize all your assets so that you can’t hire a lawyer to defend yourself, or even pay living expenses while you await trial.
But even more important is what ATF did NOT find during its search.
ATF found no illegal machineguns at all.
So, in order to make DOJ’s charges against Tate stick, Biden’s slimy swamp critters at ATF took Tate’s inert parts, slithered back under their rock in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and concocted actual machineguns.
That’s right – ATF shipped Tate’s inert firearm parts to its Firearms and Ammunition Technology Division, or “FATD.” There, ATF employees tampered with the evidence, rebuilding and reconstructing Tate’s inert items into functioning NFA firearms using government-owned components.
Take ATF’s tampering with Tate’s toy STEN gun, for example.
ATF took a nonfiring, $75 toy, and converted it into a machinegun using additional parts ATF acquired. That included forcibly inserting a bolt from a real STEN gun into the toy, swapping out the toy barrel for a real one, and manually loading and firing a single round as proof of concept.
But even after this malicious fabrication of evidence – creating a gun out of a toy – ATF still couldn’t get the STEN to shoot more than once. How that qualified it as a “machinegun” – which must shoot “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading” – is anyone’s guess.
In fact, as one anonymous former ATF official commented:
“It is egregious to assert that this STEN replica is a machine gun when it cannot accept a magazine. Without a magazine, it can only hold one cartridge at a time, making it impossible to ‘shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger, and therefore, impossible to be a machine gun.'”
But the absence of logic didn’t stop ATF from using evidence of this so-called “machinegun” in court.
It’s like the government searching your house, seizing your car and gun, using all those items to rob a bank, and then charging you with the robbery!
ATF also tampered with Tate’s two inert RPG-7s. Not only were these decorative launchers completely missing their fire control groups, but they also had holes cut into their sides to render them permanently unusable.
Yet just like with the toy STEN gun, ATF converted one of these launchers into an alleged NFA-regulated firearm – this time, a so-called destructive device.
But in order to do so, ATF patched the hole that had been cut into the side of the tube, and then installed a new trigger group.
In other words, ATF simply undid all the steps that had been taken to render the item inert in the first place.
Of course, if this is the standard for something to be a firearm then, given enough time and effort by ATF, every “inert” firearm could be reconstructed, meaning the only way to “destroy” one would be to melt it into a pool of liquified metal or plastic.
Even after reconstructing Tate’s RPG-7, ATF didn’t attempt to actually fire it.
First of all, it’s not like anyone can buy rocket-propelled grenades at a local hardware store. And even if you could, no ATF employee would want to be the guinea pig who drew the short straw and had to fire a grenade out of a launcher with a Band-Aid on the side.
So, rather than fire the actual round the RPG-7 was designed to fire, ATF decided to try something else entirely.
ATF inserted a bolt-action rifle training simulator, designed to fire a 7.62 round through the RPG.
In other words, ATF put its own gun into Tate’s inert device, and then claimed that the RPG itself was a “firearm.”
You’d think this was a joke if ATF hadn’t actually done this in real life. Crawling inside a drainage culvert and firing off a .22 does not make the drain pipe a firearm. The same goes for Tate’s demilled RPG-7.
Of course, gun owners should expect nothing less from an agency that has claimed that a sliver of metal is a machinegun, and that an ordinary metal water bottle might in fact be a firearm or even a machinegun.
The same agency that manhandled a barrel until the extension snapped off, and then claimed the firearm was ineligible for import.
Even worse was how Tate’s criminal trial eventually proceeded.
After the trial judge allowed ATF’s tampered evidence to be presented, a jury convicted Tate on all counts. Then, in 2023, the Biden DOJ triumphantly announced that Tate had been sentenced to serve 20 years in federal prison – all for inherently nonviolent conduct.
The appellate courts were no help.
The famously anti-gun U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit rejected Tate’s appeal, dispensing with his Second Amendment argument in just one sentence. And on May 18, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Tate’s petition for certiorari without even asking the government to respond.
We couldn’t think up a more unjust prosecution, conviction, and sentence if we tried.
But it speaks volumes about the sorts of people and organizations that have come to Tate’s aid.
For example, throughout this ordeal, the U.S. Navy stood with Tate, declining to prosecute him under the UCMJ.
In fact, the Navy never even demoted Tate, and instead allowed him to use personal leave time while in jail, paying him all the way. And once Tate ran out of leave, the Navy gave him an honorable discharge.
Ex-ATF agent Dan O’Kelly, Tate’s expert witness on firearms, candidly expressed in a recent interview that:
“The ATF needs numbers to justify its existence. Each agent has to produce cases in order to justify their existence. Their training is ridiculous. They’re only taught about 60 percent of what they need to know: make, model, and serial number. If you get into NFA stuff, the agents have no idea what they’re looking at….
“The federal prosecutor was shown the law. Any FEO [Firearm Enforcement Officer] who testifies to something different than that commits a willful falsehood. They are the gun experts of the gun police. They ought to be charged with perjury and jailed, not to mention being fired. This case was the worst.”
Adamiak was following a legal process and did everything he needed to do. He didn’t try to “bend” the rules; he was following the law. The ATF put him in prison anyway.
And as of the filming of this video, Tate remains in federal custody. He has now exhausted his appeals, and the Supreme Court apparently had no appetite to right this wrong.
But here’s where you come in.
We, as a community, need to help Tate.
That’s why we at Gun Owners of America are calling on the DOJ to seek a reduction in sentence in Tate’s case. Tate has an upcoming hearing where DOJ could do just that.
We also call on President Trump to grant Tate Adamiak a Presidential Pardon. After all, under this administration, ATF has entered a “new era of reform,” pledging to clarify regulations and end weaponization.
There is no better place to start than to set Tate free.
