Naturalized Certificate required for Shall-Issue Firearms License In my state of Massachusetts, before being able to purchase any firearms, you must obtain a Firearms Identification (FID) license or a License to Carry (LTC). Suppose that someone is in the process for applying for an FID, which according to our general law (140 S 129B) is a &quot;shall issue&quot; license. Suppose that this person was born in Germany and immigrated to the United States at a very young age. Once the applicant's parents obtained citizenship through naturalization, the applicant was also given citizenship because s/he was under 18 and their child. The applicant's clearest proof of citizenship is having a US passport. A town official tells the applicant that because s/he was born in Germany, they required a certificate of naturalization. When asked if a passport would be accepted instead, the police officer strangely stated that it could not be accepted because a passport has an expiry date. Furthermore, the police department's page for firearms licensing states: For a Firearms Identification Permit (FID): ... A naturalized citizen within the above age restrictions (applicant must present proof of naturalization); and ... There is the option of filing for a Certificate of Citizenship (Form N-600), however the average processing time for these applications is over a year. Everyone has a right to bear arms guaranteed by the second amendment and this is a &quot;shall issue&quot; firearms license. It seems quite insane to me that a person would need proof of naturalization despite being a US citizen. Is this legal? Can the applicant do anything besides applying for an N-600?
The police are mistaken because they don't understand immigration law. Usually, the first step to resolve this problem would be to explain the situation in a letter to or telephone call with the town attorney, elevating it from a police officer who has no training in citizenship and naturalization paperwork, to an attorney, who should either know better, or should be able to find out more easily.
This is currently untested but the U.S. Supreme Court did leave the door open to allow someone to plead the 5th amendment in order to hide their identity. In Hiibel v. Nevada the U.S. Supreme Court held that the petitioner did not have a 5th amendment right to withhold his name from a questioning police officer. The Supreme Court held that Mr. Hiibel could be arrested for failing to identify himself because Nevada's statute requiring identification was narrowly tailored and was not vague. The police officer who stopped Mr. Hiibel had reasonable suspicion that a crime had occurred and Mr. Hiibel could have satisfied Nevada's statute by simply stating his name; there was no requirement to turn over any papers or other documentation. The final paragraph of the opinion speaks of the importance of the narrow scope of the disclosure requirement and then goes on and states: ...Answering a request to disclose a name is likely to be so insignificant in the scheme of things as to be incriminating only in unusual circumstances...Even witnesses who plan to invoke the Fifth Amendment privilege answer when their names are called to take the stand. Still, a case may arise where there is a substantial allegation that furnishing identity at the time of a stop would have given the police a link in the chain of evidence needed to convict the individual of a separate offense. In that case, the court can then consider whether the privilege applies, and, if the Fifth Amendment has been violated, what remedy must follow. We do not resolve those questions here. While the court is leaving unanswered the question of whether there are circumstances where one may refuse to identify themselves, they are making it quite clear that such a situation would be very different than the case decided in Hiibel. There is a strong hint that they would uphold Fifth Amendment privilege in the situation you posit.
This is controlled by 8 U.S.C. § 1401 which details who qualifies for "birthright citizenship". Including of course the condition mandated by the 14th ammendment, Congress is otherwise free to bestow such citizenship essentially as it pleases by duly enacted legislation. One of the cases that receives birthright citizenship is a person of unknown parentage found in the United States while under the age of five years, until shown, prior to his attaining the age of twenty-one years, not to have been born in the United States. So the presumption for young children found in the US is that they are citizens by birth. The law in particular requires positive proof that the individual in question was definitely not born in the United States. Lacking this, or it failing to be found prior to reaching the age of 21 years, they are citizens. For other cases, this will likely end up falling to the courts, who will decide the matter on the preponderance of the evidence. In this case it becomes the burden of the individual claiming citizenship to establish that they are a citizen*. Birth certificates can be filed after birth, and can be submitted as evidence. The laws controlling the validity of birth certificates is locally determined. If there are other birth certificates from other countries, or conflicting witness testimony, then it will fall to the court to decide which case is more likely based on the evidence available. *More accurately the burden generally falls on the entity making the claim about someone's citizenship (their own or someone else's). In a deportation hearing, for example, it falls to the government to establish the individual is not a US citizen. Deporation only applies to aliens, so the defendant must be established as such.
The document may, but probably doesn't say what it is you are witnessing. For example, a person witnessing a statutory declaration in NSW attests: their qualification to be a witness (JP, solicitor etc.) that they actually saw the declarant sign it that they asked the declarant if they believed their declaration was true that they have known the declarant for more than 12 months OR the declarant provided a photo ID and either their face matched the photo or they had a valid reason for not showing their face. If it doesn't say then what you are witnessing is that the signature was made by a person whom you could identify if necessary (e.g. if the person denied the signature).
This is weird. Within the EU, a passport is proof of identity, and it is also proof that you are allowed to take a job in the EU. There is nothing that a birth certificate would add to this. Either the bar manager is badly misinformed, or he doesn't want to give your brother a job, and will come up with something even more ridiculous if he gets the birth certificate.
As user6726 notes in an answer, the page you link to derives from 26 USC 7701. However, it does not reproduce the text accurately. There, "United States person" is defined at section 7701(a)(30), and it notably lacks anything corresponding to "any other person that is not a foreign person." It's possible that that language is motivated by some court decision, but it's also possible that someone just added it for the sake of symmetry with the definition of "foreign person" without thinking about the logical paradox that it might create. Looking at section 7701, I don't see any explicit mention of US non-citizen nationals. It appears that such a person who does not live in one of the 50 states or the District of Columbia falls under the definition of nonresident alien at 7701(b)(1)(B) even though such a person is explicitly not an alien under the Immigration and Nationality Act. I do not see any regulations correcting this oversight, but I suppose that in practice such people are indeed treated as US citizens. I don't know enough about the classification of nonhuman legal persons as foreign or domestic to have any ideas about whether there are similar ambiguities there.
Each state, each local government, and each government agency can make their own rules on this question (if it was another U.S. state, a provision called the &quot;full faith and credit clause&quot; requires all other states to honor it). Usually, the Turkish name change document will be honored by any U.S, state or local government agency or institution if (1) the name change document or a copy of it, is certified or notarized, (2) there is an apostille from the appropriate Turkish national government official stating that the certification or notarization is valid, and (3) there is a translation of the document into English that accompanies the original document or certified copy of the document that is supported by a sworn certification from a foreign language translator that the translator is qualified to translate the document and that the translation of the document is true and correct. Sometimes, an agency or institution will also reserve the right to not honor a document if the relevant civil servant has a reasonable belief based upon some relevant fact, that the document is a fake. But, some agencies or institutions could have more relaxed, or more cumbersome, requirements by adopting regulations that say so. For example, many states have laws that allow you to do a name change for purposes of a driver's license from a pre-marital name without any other proof other than simply by declaring under oath that you got married on a particular day and changed your name, since that situation is rarely suspicious and covers the vast majority of cases. An alternative option would be to bring a name change petition to a U.S. court and to have it declare the the Turkish name change is valid, usually with essentially the same kind of evidence, but sometimes with the court allowing you to explain why you can't comply with some formality, because, for example, your country is at war and isn't issuing apostilles or your country doesn't have the concept of notarizing or certifying this particular kind of document, or because you would face persecution in that country if you had to go back to it in order to get that paperwork. Once this was done, all U.S. government, state, and local agencies and institutions would have to obey that court order, and if there are lots of agencies or institutions that have different or onerous requirements, this may be easier to do. There are also some states that recognize the concept of a common law name change. In these states, any name (and sometimes all names) that you voluntarily go by, or answer to, are legally your name, even if you don't have any paperwork to back it up.
One official form of ID should be enough. Two pieces of ID is more than most people ever carry. And not selling to you because you’re black would be illegal discrimination. But that would be hard to prove. The most likely explanation is stupidity. Or lack of training. Might be an employee who is already deep into overtime, or just not mentally present. Some people go on auto-pilot and if you showed them an age card that isn’t accepted that’s fixed in their brain. Or maybe the passport photo doesn’t look like you. If it is an unusual form of ID like a 100% valid Japanese driving license, or a damaged passport, or a library card, those might be reasonably rejected. The best course of action would be to ask for the manager. The manager should either be able to give you a sensible reason why your passport is not acceptable, or give you the goods. And if not, your case for illegal discrimination is much stronger if a supposedly competent manager refuses to serve you. (Reading the other answer: Obviously if you are too young to buy the item, which is not true in your case, then showing 100 legal IDs wouldn't get you the item. And if you look so young that a reasonable person would think it's more likely that your ID is an excellent forgery than you being 18, they could deny the sale).