Navy veteran Patrick "Tate" Adamiak, currently serving a 20-year federal sentence for possessing items the government's own expert witnesses acknowledged could not fire a single projectile, published an open letter to incoming ATF Director Robert Cekada on Tuesday asking for "clear lines, consistently enforced," Bearing Arms reported. His cert petition, No. 25-1190, is on the Supreme Court's conference table the same morning.

The letter, first published by Lee Williams at The Gun Writer, runs three pages and opens with an acknowledgment that Adamiak's prosecution occurred under former Director Steven Dettelbach. Adamiak wrote that he recognizes "the tone" that Director Cekada and Attorney General Todd Blanche have set since taking office and urged the new leadership to clarify where lawful collecting ends and criminal liability begins. "No American should have to guess where legality ends and a felony begins," he wrote, "especially when the consequence can mean decades of imprisonment and the permanent loss of constitutional rights."

Adamiak's Fourth Circuit conviction, upheld in a paragraph the panel described as "squarely foreclosed" by existing circuit precedent, arose from a collection of NFA-regulated items: cut-up parts requiring welding to function, grenade-launcher components stored separately with multiple documented lawful uses, and two demilled training devices stamped "INERT" and "TRAINING AID DUMMY." No item was shown to have fired — or to have been capable of firing — a round.

Palmetto State Armory and the National Association for Gun Rights filed the cert petition on April 10; the Supreme Court docketed it April 16 and distributed it to today's conference. AmmoLand News reports that PSA and NAGR argue the Fourth Circuit improperly avoided a Second Amendment analysis by treating Adamiak's as-applied constitutional claim as "squarely foreclosed" without running the Bruen historical-tradition test. A coalition — led by the Second Amendment Foundation and joined by the NRA, the California Rifle & Pistol Association, the Second Amendment Law Center, Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms — filed a joint amicus brief urging a grant. The brief presents a clean legal question: can a court avoid the Bruen test by defining the items themselves out of Second Amendment protection at the threshold?

Adamiak's petition is one of at least seven Second Amendment cases on today's conference docket. The remaining six are five relisted hardware-ban petitions — Viramontes v. Cook County (Illinois AR-15 ban), NAGR v. Lamont (Connecticut assault-weapon and magazine ban), Duncan v. Bonta (California magazine ban), Gator's Custom Guns (Washington magazine ban), and Grant v. Higgins (Second Circuit AR-15 companion to Viramontes) — some of which have been relisted more than a dozen consecutive times, according to The Gun Mag's Grassroots Judicial Report.

Conference results will be announced Monday, May 18. A cert grant in No. 25-1190 would place NFA criminal prosecutions under Bruen scrutiny for the first time in federal courts; a denial would leave Adamiak's sentence intact and preserve a circuit split over whether courts must apply the Bruen framework when defendants raise Second Amendment challenges in NFA prosecutions.