It’s always pleasing to read news like this …

After you read a story like this…

Former sailor Patrick Tate Adamiak once bought a replica STEN Mk. II submachinegun at a local gun show. He paid $75 for the non-firing Spanish replica – or toy – which was made by Denix and is still sold online for hundreds of dollars more.  At the time, Adamiak felt pretty good about his replica STEN purchase. Sure, it couldn’t chamber a live round, was mostly made of a zinc alloy and had a smooth rather than rifled barrel, but he planned to feature it prominently in a weapons museum he dreamed of creating. He had purchased other firearm replicas for the same reason. 

He’s now serving a 20 year jail sentence. And the “former sailor” is understating it somewhat; he was on track to become a Navy SEAL officer.

However, his little weapons museum hobby meant buying lots of gun parts, even if many were replicas, and that bumped him into the category of being a gun part dealer, hence the heavy sentence.

The thing is that none of the items seized from him are considered weapons. They were all gun parts and they were all purchased legally from long-standing, reputable dealers. 

But it’s the STEN gun that’s the really crazy story. The ATF was determined to prove that it was a real machine gun for which he had no licence. This involved a lot of work by the ATF officer, Jeffrey Bodell:

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….Eventually, using the real machinegun bolt and barrel, Bodell was able to load one round by hand and get it to fire. 

Based on that he then wrote a report saying that it was a firearm and not only that, but a real machine gun.

Hopefully someone will bring this to Trump’s attention, although I don’t think a pardon should be applied here because that’s an acknowledgement that you did something wrong, and I can’t see that this guy did. Given the corrupt bullshit of the ATF (a prosecution would have involved more than just Bodell) I’m amazed he got convicted in the first place, and his lawyers surely must have some confidence that they’ll win on appeal. Even so, now that the ATF is under new and hopefully more honest management, perhaps they can actually work with the lawyers to reverse this disgusting injustice.

Also this from GOA (Gun Owners of America), talking about the ATF infiltrating chat groups on various social media sites to hit lawful gun sales instead of going after gang gun purchases, 8m39s.