Sailor Charged with Illegal Possession of Machine Guns Gets Worse

Over the weekend, I covered the story of a former sailor serving 20 years in prison for supposedly having an unregistered machine gun. It was a non-firing replica that the ATF went to some significant lengths to modify in order for it to fire, but the sailor was sent to prison over that.

I referred to it as a miscarriage of justice.

Well, I didn’t even know the half of it.

It seems that among the other charges faced by Patrick Tate Adamiak were some stemming from some different guns, and these don’t make the ATF look the least bit better.

See, back in the 1980s, every action movie had things like Mac-10s, Uzis, and Tec-9s. So, companies started offering up semi-auto versions of these guns. Today, they’re expensive collectors pieces, apparently, and Adamiak had several of these weapons.

Two firearm firms produced thousands of these guns. RBP made semi-auto MAC-10-style semi-autos and Interdynamic made the Tec-9. Both were based on better-known fully automatic guns, but both were legal semi-autos that fired from an open bolt.

Former U.S. Navy sailor Patrick Tate Adamiak owned five of these legal firearms. Four were made by RPB and one was an Interdynamic KG-9. The purchases were a business decision by Adamiak.

“All were 100% legal. I purchased them through an FFL dealer, filled out the ATF Form 4473 and completed the background check,” Adamiak said Monday. “These are ultra-collectible, so I brought them home, put them in my safe—unmodified of course—and they sat there for years as centerpieces of my family’s collection. We never even shot them. They are rare and highly valuable, so they were more of an investment.”

Adamiak never even dreamed he would face criminal charges for the legal firearms.

“Despite being legally owned, all five of these were seized and were counted against me as ‘illegal machineguns,’ which added years to my sentence,” Adamiak said. “It took me 10 years to collect them, and not only was it a financial hit they each came with felonious consequences.”

The ATF’s Jeffrey Bodell, who was the villain of the previous piece I did, also tested these weapons. He acknowledges that the weapons worked only as semi-auto firearms, but claimed that they were really full-auto weapons as defined under law by claiming they were designed as full-auto firearms.

Except, they’re not.

When Adamiak’s attorney tried to object to this classification, Adamiak claims the judge didn’t want to hear it. Bodell’s testimony was sufficient.

A defense expert who also happened to be a former ATF agent was outright baffled by how this was even a thing. These are semi-auto firearms bought from a lawful dealer and transferred legally after a Form 4473 was filled out and a background check completed. Adamiak lawfully bought lawful firearms and he got more of a sentence because they looked like full-auto firearms.

And this outright fabrication was allowed to continue in a court of law.

I’m sorry, but you cannot hate the ATF enough. I know that you think you can, but it’s not humanly possible. No human can hate enough to meet the threshold the ATF deserves on this.

Bodell and anyone else involved in this case are walking free while Adamiak is in prison. It should be the other way around.

And based on a post on X, The Second Amendment Foundation’s Lee Williams tells me he hasn’t even written half of what happened to this young man.