Birthright citizenship doesn't sound like a gun rights issue until you think it through. Federal law draws a hard line between citizens, lawful permanent residents, and undocumented immigrants when it comes to firearms purchases. If the court narrows who gets citizenship at birth, you're looking at a future class of adults — born on American soil — who may not be able to walk into a gun store and fill out a 4473. That's not hypothetical. That's downstream of this ruling.

"Wong Kim Ark never suggested that parental domicile was necessary, just that it was more than sufficient in Mr. Wong's case."

That's the whole ballgame right there. DOJ is counting the word "domicile" in a 126-year-old ruling and calling it precedent — but sufficient and necessary are not the same legal standard, and any first-year law student knows it. If the justices let that slide, they're rewriting a constitutional clause using a word that isn't even in the clause.

The detail about DOJ citing page 659 of a case that ends on page 651 is the kind of thing that would get a gun store employee fired for running the wrong background check form. Sloppy sourcing in a brief headed to the Supreme Court isn't a typo — it's a tell about how much the legal architecture here is improvised.

The Martinez v. Bynum angle is the one worth watching. DOJ is leaning on a case where the court just assumed the kid was a U.S. citizen — exactly the outcome DOJ is arguing against. That's not a citation, that's an own goal.

Oral arguments are April 1. How this gets decided will matter to gun owners in ways most people won't connect until it's already law.

Have you ever had a customer or shooting buddy run into a firearms purchase issue tied to immigration or residency status — and how did that play out at the counter or at the FFL?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett