But people don’t kill people with replica guns, because they are not guns.
The point appears to be lost on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATFE), the nation’s top cops for enforcing federal firearms laws.
It’s nearly illegal, and very difficult, for regular civilians to get machine guns, or anti-tank rocket launchers. But you can get replicas of either; at most, they’ll have been demilitarized, with things like triggers, bolts and firing pins removed and plugs welded into barrels; at the lower level, they are metal facismiles that are specifically deisgned not to be able to shoot anything, absent some fairly malicious ingenuity.
Which brings us to the case of Patrick Adamlak – who had a business, selling not firearms, but replicas, including of “RPG’7s” – the Soviet-era “bazooka” famous from “Black Hawk Down” and countless third world wars – and of a “Sten” submachinine gun, a bargain-basement British weapon from World War 2 favored by Resistance groups on the continent.
This is the story of Patrick “Tate” Adamlak, a US Navy Petty Officer First Class and candiate for Naval Special Warfare (from which we might deduce had had a clean criminal record), and his…gun store?
No. Replica store.
None of these inert launchers require a Federal Firearm License for the purchase because they’re not firearms. They aren’t real. Many have had their internal parts stripped. To be clear, these are non-firearms, which are perfectly legal for anyone to buy or own … unless you’re Patrick “Tate” Adamiak.
Adamiak is about to start the third year of his 20-year federal prison sentence because the ATF reworked his legal inert RPGs until they were capable of firing a single 7.62x39mm round.
The case involves the ATF raiding Mr. Adamiak’s…gun collection? The BATFE got to Mr. Adamlak via a confidential informant who’d seem to have had an interest in getting himself out of a jam:
“He used to own a machinegun shop,” Adamiak said. “The ATF raided his house, found a gun and charged him with felon in possession. He kept asking me for a machinegun, which I never got him. I got him a shroud off of Gun Broker. The ATF paid him around $8,000 for my case alone.”
“To be clear, I never sold a single item that qualifies as a firearm or requires an FFL (Federal Firearm License). Only non-regulated gun parts,” Adamiak said.
While dropping off gear at Adamiak’s home, the CI saw the replica grenade launcher and belt-fed machinegun replicas. He asked Adamiak if he had an SOT (Class 3 FFL).
“No, they’re replicas,” Adamiak replied. “That was the end of the conversation. We finished trading and bartering and he left.”
But eventually, the BATFE raided Adamiak again, confiscated a few replicas – and set about trying to make them work.
First came the republica “Sten” gun. The “barrel” was made of zinc – which, if you can actually put a live round through it, is just as likely to be called “shrapnel”, zinc is a soft metal, which is the opposite of the property that makes a real gun barrel. It was also basically stuck into the barrel, not pinned or screwed in like an actual firearm barrel. The “replica”/toy also had no bolt – the part that keeps the bullet in the barrel, and no magazine – bullet holder – could be made to fit it even with the BATFE’s full genius at work.
Bodell went a bit crazy in his testing. He inserted a real machinegun bolt from a real STEN submachinegun and replaced the toy’s fake barrel with a real STEN barrel, which did not fit until the technician “wrapped it with a few layers of electrical tape to make a tight fit, and press fit the machinegun barrel.”
There was another problem: no real magazine would fit into the toy gun.
“Due to the fashion in which I improvised a machinegun barrel to fit, a magazine cannot be inserted due to the barrel being too far aft,” Bodell wrote in his report.
It took a while, but agent Bodell managed to get a round to squeeze out the muzzle:
Eventually, using the real machinegun bolt and barrel, Bodell was able to load one round by hand and get it to fire.
“I test fired Exhibit 28, assembled as described above, on June 8, 2022, at the ATF test range in Martinsburg, West Virginia, using commercially available, Federal brand, 9mm Luger caliber ammunition. I pulled the bolt to the rear until it engaged with the sear, inserted one cartridge into the chamber of the barrel, and pulled the trigger. The Exhibit successfully expelled a projectile by the action of an explosive,” he wrote. “The process of converting Exhibit 28 into a weapon which will expel a projectile by the action of an explosive was extremely simple. No specialized knowledge, tools, or machining were required to convert Exhibit 28. Only three items were utilized in the conversion process: a STEN machinegun barrel, a STEN machinegun bolt, and electrical tape. The entire process took approximately five minutes.”
Once the gun fired a single round, Bodell wrote that the toy STEN was a firearm, and he also determined it was “a machinegun as defined.” However, he claimed the records were missing for the thousands of other fake STENs that had already been imported from the Spanish firm.
The “Sten” fired one round, and likely couldn’t have fired another; a zinc barrel might as well be cardboard.
And that pales compared to what Agent Bodell did to make Adamiak’s replica RPG-7 shoot, not a rocket, but a rifle round. This is notwithstanding the fact that the rocket launcher had been originally built as a training simulator, had no trigger or firing pin, and had had a hole drilled into the exhaust tube right about where the user’s face would have been had they tried to fire a real rocket, rendering it literally more dangerous to shoot than to be shot at.
Perhaps most telling was that Adamiak’s inert RPGs were missing all of the critical fire control components, which were never found in his possession. As a result, case law was on Adamiak’s side.
Adamiak had none of the essential parts needed to turn his RPGs into actual weapons.
But Agent Bodell rummaged around the BATFE’s inventory of confiscated parts, found some fire control parts from a real RPG as well as a “subcaliber” training rifle barrel that allowed it to shoot, not a rocket, but a rifle round.
It’s a little like tacking on enough armor and firearms to make a riding lawn mower qualify as a tank.
The point being that while there are plenty of actual crimes for our various levels of bureaucracy to go after, some parts of our federal law (sic) enforcement are apparnetly bored and idle enough to literally, not figuratively, manufacture evidence.
