Last week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told an audience of tens of thousands, “We’re no longer going to regulate by prosecuting.” The audience receiving that message was bitcoiners attending the popular, annual Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas. The Justice Department now has an opportunity to send that same message to the Second Amendment community, and they can follow the lead of the amicus brief just filed in the case of Tate Adamiak.
On May 4, a number of gun rights groups, led by the Second Amendment Foundation, filed a joint amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the case of Patrick Tate Adamiak v. United States of America. Joining SAF in the brief were National Rifle Association of America, California Rifle & Pistol Association, Second Amendment Law Center, Inc., Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
“This case highlights the human cost of lower courts’ refusal to faithfully apply Bruen,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb, in a press statement.
SAF Director of Legal Research and Education, and Counsel of Record on the brief, Kostas Moros, stated, “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 well-known case addresses what is widely viewed as a wrongful conviction of Mr. Adamiak by a weaponized government agency, with strong allegations that it manufactured evidence leading to the conviction of Mr. Adamiak for essentially possessing gun parts, and a 20-year prison sentence. SAF investigative journalist, Lee Williams, has closely documented the case with more than 40 stories on Adamiak.
The 27-page amicus brief focuses primarily on the Second Amendment aspects of the case, the definition of an “arm,” and how the Supreme Court’s own decision in the 2022 Bruen case necessarily applies.
Perhaps most significantly, the brief points out the Court’s frustrating approach to taking only cases that have been thoroughly explored by lower courts in a process it calls “percolation” which can take years or even a decade or more, leaving plaintiffs like Mr. Adamiak with little to no legal recourse.
This case 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 Petitioner’s Second Amendment arguments were not rejected on the merits; instead, they were never even considered because they were deemed foreclosed by circuit precedent.
In October of 2025, the Fourth Circuit vacated one of Mr. Adamiak’s convictions and sent the case back to the district court for re-sentencing. At that time, the Bondi Justice Department asked the court to affirm Mr. Adamiak’s conviction.
Now, six months later, the Justice Department is purporting to take a new approach to how it is approaching regulations, specifically in the Second Amendment arena with its April 29 announcement of the “most comprehensive regulatory reform package in the history of the ATF”.
There could be no better time for the Justice Department to make good on that regulatory reform announcement – and its similar promise to the bitcoin community – by backing this amicus brief with a similar one of its own, one that would decline to defend the ongoing prosecution and sentencing of Mr. Adamiak.
