And forces that would strip away gun rights are hopping mad.
Besides an outright ban of all civilian firearms, which the Second Amendment expressly forbids, there are other primary goals of the anti-gun lobby. Near the top of the list is a national registry of weapons.
This would constitute knowing exactly who owns which firearms and precisely how many rounds of ammunition to go with them. Again, in their perfect world there would be no guns in the population, but that’s a pipe dream for now.
So, gun control zealots march in a different direction.
One of those directions is to have the ability to know who purchased a firearm, when it was bought and where. This could very well be made possible through proposals to track weapons sales using credit card transaction records.
The insidious idea first surfaced near the end of 2022 when the concept of a gun-specific Merchant Category Code (MCC) was initially floated. It was the brainchild of New York Times anti-gun columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and Amalgamated Bank.
This financial institution is well known to support several politicians and organizations lined up against the Second Amendment.
The idea was to separate firearm and ammunition purchases into their own MCC. This would create a database of these transactions, and it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to see where this protocol could easily lead.
Amalgamated Bank then successfully lobbied the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a Swiss-based group, for the creation of the firearm retailer-specific MCC.
Sorkin even confessed to the scheme being a necessary first step toward the creation of a national gun registry.
But something funny happened on the way to this all-encompassing gun owner database. States with a healthy respect for the Second Amendment rose together in protest. Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Texas and West Virginia all planted their flags on the side of personal liberties and gun rights.
Each enacted laws protecting Second Amendment privacy, and at least temporarily this created the desired result. Visa, MasterCard and American Express announced last year that they halted the new MCC program due to the myriad of laws across the nation making the system unworkable.
And now Indiana and Utah have joined this illustrious group that sees still more states considering similar actions. Further, the Protecting Privacy in Purchases Act was introduced in the House of Representatives by U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to make such protections the law of the land.
This would have a difficult time clearing the Senate, much less the White House, and all is not well in the war to protect the privacy of gun purchases.
Anti-gun California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) recently signed a new law requiring such records be kept in the Golden State. Colorado is considering a similar action, and word came that credit card companies are quietly attempting to comply with these new edicts.
So, despite last year’s temporary victory, the fight is far from over. It was good news in recent days when Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb (R) and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) signed their new state laws into existence and protected Second Amendment rights for their citizens.
But more needs to be done, and more states should step up and reject these egregious actions by financial transaction firms. It must be made clear that constitutional rights are not for sale and not up for negotiation.
And having a national gun registry is only one small step away from the ultimate goal of anti-gun forces.
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