Some of America’s major corporations have once again surrendered to leftist Democrats.
This time the issue is guns.
The nation’s biggest credit-card companies – Visa, Mastercard, and American Express – have agreed to classify firearms and ammunition purchases as an individual category of purchases.
The effect is that it would make guns and ammo more easily traceable through the financial system.
Visa, the country’s largest individual processor of such payments, agreed to the shift on Saturday, following Mastercard and American Express.
The conservative website JustTheNews.com reported on Saturday that the companies’ acted less than a week after New York Attorney General Letitia James and California Attorney General Rob Bonta wrote to them asking for this change.
Their argument is that, as other industry-specific retailers have their own purchasing codes, doing so for guns “could help identify suspicious activity that could prevent a mass shooting or stop gun trafficking,” Just The News reported.
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Liberal New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul last week also tweeted for the financial firms to take action. “Everyone needs to do their part to combat gun violence. @AmericanExpress, @Mastercard & @Visa should categorize firearm purchases & flag suspicious activity – just like they do for millions of other transactions,” she said on Twitter. “Together we can help stop gun trafficking & keep New Yorkers safe.”
Others, though, saw this as a backdoor attempt at gun control. That’s because, as with most things Democrats seek to accomplish, there is no limiting principle to protect the general public, which in this case is law-abiding gun owners.
As Tom Knighton, a columnist for the pro-Second Amendment website BearingArms.com, wrote recently, the credit companies have opened Pandora’s box of reasons to strip gun owners of their rights.
“Is someone who just bought an AR-15 suspicious? What about someone who just purchased a thousand rounds of ammo? Are they planning an attack or do they shoot enough that it just makes sense to buy it in bulk and save a few bucks?” he wrote.
What about a guy that buys a handgun, a rifle, and a shotgun along with a ton of ammo? Surely he’s up to something, right? More likely, he’s taking up three-gun shooting competitions for fun and is getting ready to compete.”
“The truth of the matter is that credit card companies aren’t equipped to determine a suspicious purchase of a firearm or not,” Knighton added.
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And like most efforts of gun control, it will be ineffective, he added.
“Financial institutions as a whole are on the lookout for certain crimes because they have to be done through the financial system. It’s practically a requirement,” Knighton wrote.
“Gun sales, however, aren’t potential crimes. It’s the exercising of a constitutional right and one that many of us don’t trust the government to know about. If our credit card companies are going to start snooping, people will simply find a way around them and do so lawfully.”
“People will just use the cash advance feature on their card, pay for the gun that way, and the company is just as clueless as they were before.”
Yes, but liberals can still claim that they have “done something” to stop gun violence – and that posturing, in addition to opening an avenue for snooping into the lives of gun owners, is the whole point of this exercise.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Free Press.
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