On September 4, 2026, President Donald Trump pardoned four men convicted of federal firearms offenses under the National Firearms Act: Patrick “Tate” Adamiak, George Peterson, Shane Cox, and Jeremy Kettler. Each man had already been investigated, indicted, convicted, and sentenced. Three had exhausted their appeals years ago. Litigation can still change what the law will do to the next defendant; it cannot unwind what has already been done to a man who has served, or is serving, a federal sentence. Only the pardon power reaches backward like that, and it is worth walking through what it reached in these four cases.
Four Men the NFA Put in Prison
Adamiak was a former active-duty U.S. Navy petty officer, an E-6 who had been accepted into training for the Navy SEALs, before the ATF built a case against him. He was convicted in 2023 of an NFA violation predicated not on a complete, functioning firearm but on parts — components the government argued added up to a regulated item. He was sentenced to more than twenty years in federal prison.
Peterson ran PDW Solutions, LLC. In the summer of 2022, ATF agents searched his home in the Eastern District of Louisiana and found an unregistered suppressor made from a kit. He moved to dismiss the indictment on Second Amendment grounds and to suppress the evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds; District Judge Jay C. Zainey denied both motions. Peterson entered a conditional guilty plea preserving his right to appeal, and on January 9, 2024, he was sentenced to twenty-four months in prison plus three years of supervised release.
Cox and Kettler were both convicted in Kansas in 2016 after relying on their own state’s law. Kansas had enacted a Second Amendment Protection Act in 2013 purporting to exempt firearms and accessories made and kept entirely within the state from federal regulation. The federal government prosecuted them anyway. Kettler was convicted on a single count involving an unregistered silencer. Cox was convicted on eight counts tied to making and marketing short-barreled rifles and suppressors. The Kansas Senate later passed a resolution urging a presidential pardon for both men.
Crimes Without a Victim
I have long argued that the National Firearms Act’s registration and tax provisions criminalize conduct that is malum prohibitum, not malum in se. A malum in se crime — murder, rape, robbery — is wrong in itself, in any society, with or without a statute on the books. A malum prohibitum offense is wrong only because a legislature declared it so. Possessing an unregistered suppressor or an unregistered set of parts harms no one. There is no victim in any of these four cases, no injured party, no property destroyed. What existed was a paperwork violation elevated by federal prosecutors into decades of imprisonment. That is the frame through which these four pardons should be read: not as leniency toward dangerous men, but as correction of prosecutions that never should have carried the weight they did.
Why Clemency Reaches What Courts Cannot
Peterson’s own case shows the limits of litigation as a remedy. He appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which issued an opinion on February 6, 2025, affirming his conviction on the theory that a suppressor, standing alone, is not an “arm” protected by the Second Amendment. The court then took the unusual step of withdrawing that opinion in June 2025 and substituting new reasoning, culminating in a further substituted opinion on December 9, 2025, authored by Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod. That final opinion assumed without deciding that a suppressor may be a protected arm, but held that the NFA’s registration and licensing scheme survives as a presumptively lawful means of regulating it. The Supreme Court denied certiorari in April 2026. Peterson’s conviction stood through every stage of appellate review. Litigation, run to its conclusion, left him convicted. A pardon did not.
That is the essential distinction. A favorable appellate ruling operates prospectively — it tells future prosecutors and future defendants what the law now requires. It does not retroactively erase a sentence a man has already begun serving, unless his own case is the one still pending on direct appeal. Cox and Kettler’s convictions had been final for a decade. No pending motion, no circuit split, no future Supreme Court grant could have touched them. The pardon power was the only mechanism the Constitution supplies that reaches backward into a closed case and lifts the conviction itself.
What a Pardon Does — and Does Not — Do
A pardon should not be mistaken for a judicial ruling that the underlying statute is unconstitutional. It is an act of executive grace under Article II that relieves an individual of the legal consequences of a conviction — the sentence, the criminal record, the civil disabilities that follow a felony. It does not touch the precedent. The Fifth Circuit’s holding in Peterson’s own case remains the law of that circuit notwithstanding the pardon; a future defendant charged with the identical conduct in Louisiana, Texas, or Mississippi would face the same presumptively-lawful-licensing analysis Judge Elrod’s court articulated, unless and until that precedent is overturned through further litigation or legislative change. The pardon reached the man. It did not reach the rule.
That distinction should not diminish what happened here. For Adamiak, Peterson, Cox, and Kettler, the rule was never going to matter again — what mattered was the sentence, the record, and the disabilities attached to a felony conviction for conduct that harmed no one. President Trump’s pardons undid all of that in a single stroke, something no appellate victory, however sweeping, could have accomplished for men whose cases had already run their course.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.