The Same ATF That Railroaded Sailor on Gun Charges Won’t Investigate Real Gun Crime

The name Patrick Tate Adamiak is quickly gaining some notoriety in the gun world. At first, he was just a sailor convicted of selling machine guns and machine gun parts. With there being a conviction, I thought we had a pretty clear-cut case of wrongdoing.

Then, Lee Williams at The Gun Writer started digging, and what we saw was something completely different. I’ve talked about what Williams has found previously here, and here.

But while the ATF was busy railroading a sailor for doing something he most definitely didn’t do and making life difficult for licensed gun dealers, they couldn’t be bothered to look into an actual crime involving the left of a firearm.

When Paul Szabo purchased the Shooter’s Emporium in 2020, which is located just a short 45-minute drive north of Indianapolis, he got some “bad vibes” from an employee whom he later terminated.

Szabo’s fears were quickly confirmed. An in-house audit revealed that a brand-new Ruger American Rimfire rifle worth about $350 was missing, and evidence led directly to the former employee.

“I gave him the opportunity to return the rifle. He told us to f— off, so we called the police,” Szabo told the Second Amendment Foundation.

Just a few days later, in July 2022, Szabo also submitted a report to the ATF.

Six months later, the suspect was arrested for the state crimes of theft and forgery: 35-43-4-2(a)/F5: Theft-Use when property stolen is a firearm, and 35-43-5-2(b)(4)/F6: Forgery-Def, w/intent to defraud, makes/utters written instrument.

Now, nearly three years later, Szabo has been waiting for a trial date that never comes, and the suspect was hired by a competing gun shop, where he’s been very busy.

“He hacked all of our social media accounts. He hacked our special-order accounts. We started losing customers to the other dealer, who denied he ever worked there,” Szabo said. “The next thing that happened is the prosecuting attorney sent me an email and had me look at a document. It was a 4473 for the rifle in question, filled out, completed and signed and stamped by another local FFL. It had a different name that signed the 4473 for the rifle, which has been sitting in the police department’s lockup.”

Szabo is livid that the case remains in state court rather than federal court being prosecuted by the ATF.

Honestly, Szabo has a point.

The ATF is about useless, but if there’s one thing that people can universally agree the ATF should work on, it’s the theft of firearms, particularly from FFL holders. Theft is a crime no matter how you slice it. The theft of a firearm usually leads to a gun being in the hands of a criminal. This is exactly what the ATF should be spending its resources investigating and prosecuting.

Here, we have a prime example, and where is the ATF?

They’re too busy shuffling around personnel to avoid having to adhere to President Donald Trump’s executive orders. They’re taking a non-firing replica of a machine gun and modifying it so that it’ll fire a single shot, then prosecuting the person possessing the replica for having an unregistered machine gun, all despite evidence that it was never modified and the modifications the ATF made most definitely not falling under anyone’s interpretation of being “readily modified.”

This is what our tax dollars have been going for, folks. This is why a lot of people want to see the ATF abolished. Even if the other gun laws remain in place, one might hope that the FBI would at least join in on the investigation of something like this, though I’m not inclined to get my own hopes up.

Regardless, this is something that acting Director Kash Patel should probably look into, because this is ridiculous.