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Firearm Definitions

Which of the following terms accurately describes the M4 carbine that serves as the U.S. Armed Forces’ weapon of choice?

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The U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines all refer to the M4 carbine as an “assault rifle.” This class of firearms typically has a feature called “selective-fire” that lets the shooter switch between semi-automatic and fully automatic modes or a three-round burst. Federal law has largely banned civilians from purchasing assault rifles since 1986. “Assault weapons,” on the other hand, is a label often used by the media and gun control activists to describe common semi-automatic rifles used for self-defense and hunting, such as the AR-15. In 1988, a prominent gun control activist wrote that calling these guns “assault weapons” would exploit the “public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns” and thereby “increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.” Machine guns are a different class of weapons that commonly feed rounds through a belt (as opposed to a magazine), are secured to a mount like a tripod, and cannot be easily carried around in combat.

DocumentationM4 Military Descriptions Automatic Weapons “Assault Weapons”

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Birthright Citizenship Duplicity

U.S. Senator Corey Booker (D–NJ) claims that the “hypocrisy” of Republicans is “staggering” because “Marco Rubio, Kash Patel, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, and Donald Trump’s father all got U.S. citizenship thanks to the 14th Amendment.”

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IN FACT, the parents of these prominent Republicans were legal immigrants — not illegal aliens, tourists, or temporary residents. Here are the specifics:

Per the Tampa Bay Times, the parents of Marco Rubio “walked into the American Consulate in Havana” Cuba in 1956 and “applied for immigrant visas” to “permanently” move to the United States, “not tourist visas.”
Per the Encyclopædia Britannica, Kash Patel’s “parents are Indian immigrants” who “settled in Long Island, New York” where his “father was a financial officer at an aviation company.”
Per the Post and Courier, Nikki Haley’s parents were “natives of India” who “moved to rural South Carolina in 1969” where her “father took a professor post at Voorhees College,” and her mother “taught sixth grade social studies in the local public schools before starting a gift shop she turned into a million-dollar fashion boutique.”
Per Reuters, Bobby Jindal was “born in the United States to Indian immigrant parents who held green cards at the time.”
Per the Gotham Center for New York City History, Donald Trump’s grandfather “had become an American citizen in 1892,” 13 years before the birth of Trump’s father in 1905.
In contrast, President Trump’s Executive Order attempted to stop the federal government from awarding U.S. citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, tourists, and temporary residents.
However, the Supreme Court recently ruled (5–4) in the case of Trump v. Barbara that all children born “within” the “jurisdiction” of the U.S. or “within its territory” are U.S. citizens under the 14th Amendment, even if their parents are “illegally or temporarily in the United States.”
To justify their decision, the majority ignored the fact that the 14th Amendment uses the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” for birthright citizenship and then uses the phrase “within its jurisdiction” for a separate subject, proving that these phrases are not synonymous.
To justify their decision, the majority summarily dismissed the words of U.S. Senator Jacob Howard, who introduced the 14th Amendment in the U.S. Senate while stating that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” doesn’t include the children of “foreigners,” “aliens,” “ambassadors, “ “foreign ministers,” or anyone who is not subject to the “full and complete jurisdiction on the part of the United States,” “that is to say, the same jurisdiction in extent and quality as applies to every citizen of the United States now.”
To justify their decision, the majority appealed to an old “English common law” called the “right of the soil” in which all people “born within the dominions” of a kingdom “were considered subjects” of “the King,” even though the founders of the U.S. explicitly rejected such feudal doctrines, and the 14th Amendment was enacted 92 years after the United States “absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown.”
To justify their decision, the majority cited the 1844 case of Lynch v. Clarke 13 times, even though it predates the 14th Amendment by 24 years and is “not a precedent” of the Supreme Court or “any federal court, or any state appellate court, or even a court of law” but was “decided by a New York ‘assistant vice-chancellor’ in a court of equity’s equivalent to a trial court.”
To justify their decision, the majority invoked the 1898 Supreme Court case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark 16 times, even though the case involved a child of legal immigrants, not illegal immigrants or tourists.
To justify their decision, the majority appealed to non-binding dicta from Wong Kim Ark, even though Ark’s dicta contradicts itself by claiming that the 14th grants citizenship to virtually “all children here born of resident aliens” while also stating that the 14th only grants citizenship to the children of people who “are permitted by the United States to reside here.” This plainly excludes illegal immigrants and visitors.

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