Credit card giants Visa, Mastercard, and American Express will start categorizing sales of guns from gun shops using a new merchant code from the International Organization for Standardization. Previously, individual sales from gun stores were categorized as “general merchandise.”
Gun control advocates are delighted. They claim the categorization of gun store sales will help prevent mass shootings, make it easier to track gun purchases, and cure cancer.
Well, maybe not that last one. But they’re very satisfied with the results of their pressure campaign.
Now, the gun control lobby will go to banks and start pressuring them not to take credit card sales from gun shops. And isn’t it convenient that the banks can now easily identify gun sales by the code that was just approved by the credit card companies? Visa, Mastercard, and other credit card companies are middlemen between the merchant and the bank, and pressuring large banks to refuse to honor credit card sales would potentially devastate the firearms industry.
New York City officials and pension funds had pushed the ISO and banks to adopt the new code on gun shop sales.
Two of the largest public pension funds in the U.S., which are located in California and New York, have put pressure on the country’s largest credit card companies to adopt separate sales codes for gun sales.
Merchant category codes are not exclusive to gun store sales, however, as the codes now exist for nearly every type of purchase, including those at supermarkets, clothing stores, coffee shops and other retailers.
The firearms industry sells around $70 billion worth of guns, generating about $28 billion in profit. It’s doubtful that many banks would refuse to honor purchases of legal firearms — today. What might happen in the future — especially if Democrats can maintain control of both houses of Congress — can only be imagined.
Gun control advocates claim that the merchant code for standalone gun and ammunition retailers could curb gun violence. A week before the 2016 Pulse Nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, the gunman purchased more than $26,000 worth of guns and ammunition using credit cards.
However, gun rights advocates contest that tracking gun store sales would target legal gun purchases because merchant codes only label the type of merchant where the credit or debit card is used, not the specific items. The purchase of a gun safe, for example, could be seen as a large purchase at a gun shop since the item can be bought for thousands of dollars. But a gun safe is a product considered to be part of responsible gun ownership.
These codes are more than data collection fed into the maw of consumer research. Tracing legal gun purchases violates the spirit of the Second Amendment.
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“The [industry’s] decision to create a firearm-specific code is nothing more than a capitulation to anti-gun politicians and activists bent on eroding the rights of law-abiding Americans one transaction at a time,” National Rifle Association spokesman Lars Dalseide said.
The new code certainly has that potential, given what we know the anti-gun lobby is capable of.
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