By Larry Keane
Gun control groups are reviving their effort to not just get inside America’s gun safes but meddle in credit card purchases.
Giffords, the gun control group founded by former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.), and GunsDownAmerica, an activist gun control group with links to far-left Washington, D.C., think tanks, are supporting an effort to have credit card companies create special purchasing codes for firearms and ammunition. The idea is that credit card companies would monitor individual purchases by law-abiding citizens and if they seem to be out of the norm, those purchases would be reported to law enforcement for investigation.
The shooters in at least 5 mass shootings have stockpiled guns & ammo using credit cards and killed 145 people.@Visa, @Mastercard, @americanexpress have the power to flag suspicious purchases and save lives. Call on them to act. https://t.co/7FpUwLOCgV
— Giffords (@GiffordsCourage) August 28, 2022
GunsDownAmerica wants credit card companies to stop categorizing firearm and ammunition purchases as “sporting goods” and create a new code. That’s also a position that’s being pushed by several New York state lawmakers and Amalgamated Bank, a union-owned bank that’s also helped finance the Democratic National Committee and Political Action Committees including Biden-Harris Democrats, Ready for Hillary (which is Hillary Clinton’s Super PAC), U.S. Sen Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Ma.) Warren Democrats and U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif) PAC.
Corporate Big Brother
Amalgamated Bank bills itself as a “socially-responsible” bank that’s got over $7.7 billion in assets and nearly $59 billion under management, much of which is tied to union pension funds. When the bank isn’t financing left-wing causes including Occupy Wall Street, it uses the market capital to muscle through liberal policies including climate activism, labor practices and fighting excessive executive salaries, despite the fact that the President and CEO Priscilla Sims Brown rakes in $3.8 million in income.
SEE ALSO: NY Congresswoman Announces Bill to Tax AR Makers 20 Percent Extra on All Revenue
Sims Brown is the same person who took to the airwaves to push the idea of tracking credit card-based gun and ammunition purchases. Amalgamated Bank sent a request to create the special Merchant Category Codes (MCC) to the International Organization for Standardization in 2021. That request and an appeal were rejected. Another request was made this year and a decision is pending.
This idea is coming from a bank that refuses business with any in the firearm industry. Amalgamated Bank’s idea is that bureaucratic businesses would not just monitor who exercises their Constitutionally-protected Second Amendment rights, but also how much and how often an individual chooses to do so. They bill it as a way to help law enforcement identify individuals who might commit horrific atrocities and intervene before they do.
Beyond the Law
What it really is is privatized gun control that runs roughshod over rights and the law. The 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act forbids the federal government from maintaining a gun registry. Banks are already required to report suspicious activity under the 1970 Banking Secrecy Act and expanded with the Patriot Act. This idea, though, would put that into private hands, building a registry one purchase at a time. The basis for suspicious activity would simply be exercising the pre-existing right to keep and bear arms, which is expressly protected by the Constitution.
New York state lawmakers are interested in the idea. Over four dozen anti-gun lawmakers signed a letter to credit card companies MasterCard and American Express urging them to adopt unique MCCs for firearms and ammunition. Currently, they are listed as “specialty retailers” or “sporting goods.” The problem is that guns are purchased for sporting use. Some are purchased for self-defense. Many firearms are used for multiple purposes – including self-defense, recreational shooting sports and hunting.
Rejected Before
This idea isn’t new. A public pressure campaign was attempted in 2018. New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin floated the same notion in February and December of 2018. Visa and MasterCard both rejected the proposals then, adding that monitoring and arbitrating the private purchases of their customers “sets a dangerous precedent.” Visa told Breitbart in 2018, “We do not believe Visa should be in the position of setting restrictions on the sale of lawful goods and services.”
Gun industry puppets like Larry Keane will come up with every reason not to save lives from gun violence. pic.twitter.com/c4y9JgHJZf
— Giffords (@GiffordsCourage) August 29, 2022
The idea that capturing credit card purchase data to assist law enforcement isn’t the answer. Dumping data on law enforcement of law-abiding citizens only creates an information morass. It is garbage data when law enforcement has already missed bona fide tips that would have prevented these tragedies. The FBI admitted it missed taking action on two tips before the tragedy in Parkland, Fla. The murderer in Buffalo, N.Y., was brought in by state police after making threats, yet authorities there took no action even after his own family took away his firearms. The murderer in Uvalde, Texas, posted threats against schools and fellow classmates, yet none were reported to police. And, the murderer in Highland Park was on the radar of law enforcement, yet the local police did not share the information with the Illinois State Police.
This idea isn’t about improving public safety. This proposal is about freezing gun purchases and getting corporate entities to skirt federal laws. This is nothing short of swiping the ability to legally buy guns.
Larry Keane is Senior Vice President of Government and Public Affairs and General Counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry trade association.
brain dead gabby and her turn coat hubby should be blocked from ant activity’s that pertain to firearms
just sticking the nose in where it dont belong
Bank Of America has been doing that for several months now. And I dropped them like a bad habit. I told them that it was a invasion of my privacy. Besides you have to sign a waver to let them to do that. It’s in there own banking contract.
Can anyone name a mass shooting, or even a single shooting, that involved a credit card purchase that would have been flagged as a “suspicious purchase”? I thought not.
As terrible as any gun-involved homicide is, they are statistically a drop in the bucket. But, the issue can be whipped into a frenzy by those who have ulterior motives, which aren’t to save lives, despite what they say.
Lanza was intially a timed person who would cower as others passed him by. What changed to make him a hyper-aggressive maniac?
As long as the “HIPPA” (sp?) laws prevent the medical history of violent criminals from becoming public knowledge all solutions will be based on incomplete information. A person who has been determined to have committed a violant crime should lose any privacy protections.
It seems to me that many of these criminals are being treated with Psychotropic Pharmacuedicals and Big Pharma is hiding behind the HIPPA laws. And Big Pharma made Lanza the monster he became.
Why not introduce legislation to track politicians spending? Since they are using our tax dollars we have a right to know! Odd how money spent on abortions is privacy protected???? The criminals will be happy since they use false identities, black market, or just plain steal what they need and it will have no effect on them!!!
Agreed and their use of jets private or government jets
and the pelosi’s alcohol purchases
Just sayin
Actually, Larry (not that you’d ever read this), the information WAS shared with the Illinois State Police, but based on the lack of complaints by the family and no prosecutable crimes, decided these threats (with knives, not guns) were nothing burgers.
But what these cases really show is that the signs of mental disorder or disease leading to the exceedingly rare instances of mass shootings are very difficult to identify with anything but hindsight. Adam Lanza did not act out until his mother decided she could no longer control his outbursts (he was autistic) and told him she was going to send him away to an institution. The Aurora gunman was adult onset schizophrenia who was diagnosed but not reported to campus police before the police had time to act. His psychiatrist did not know about his collection of firearms and ammunition–nor did his parents. The kid in Santa Barbara that shot up the campus before his voluntary exit was known by his parents to have “issues” for which he had been treated for years, but they did not know he owned firearms or that he was dangerous. The Vegas shooter to this day we do not know why he did what he did, and he had legally purchased all of his firearms and had no history (that we know of) of violence. We are not dealing with a well-developed and exact science of mental health and diagnostic criteria; instead it is mostly just educated guessing.