Gun Rights Groups Come Out Swinging Against Credit Card Companies Over Tracking Gun Purchases

There are a lot of new weapons being employed by the Democratic Party to try and place limitations on an individual’s Second Amendment rights. It seems they are going beyond the usual tools of the trade, and gun control legislation, and are now attempting to find ways to use other kinds of businesses, like credit card companies, to infringe on the right to bear arms. In fact, it seems the left has convinced these very companies to now begin tracking gun purchases.

According to Newsmax, gun rights advocates are rightly ticked off concerning the recent announcement by credit card companies, referring to the decision to track purchases in a new, more specific category as an erosion of Second Amendment rights.

The National Rifle Association, perhaps the most popular gun rights advocacy group in the country, commented on the policy, calling it “anti-gun” and stating that it would result in the targeting of law-abiding citizens who are legally allowed to buy and possess these weapons.

“The industry’s decision to create a firearm-specific code is nothing more than capitulation to anti-gun politicians and activists bent on eroding the rights of law-abiding Americans, one transaction at a time,” NRA spokesman Lars Dalseide went on to say about the recent decision.

“This is not about tracking or prevention or any virtuous motivation — it’s about creating a national registry of gun owners,” Dalseide added.

A few Second Amendment advocates then posted a tweet saying that they would avoid this particular issue by only paying for their purchases with cash. This will put the hurt down on credit card companies since they will not be used to process the transaction and receive the cash flow they normally would for gun purchases when they were under the category of sporting goods.

“Criminals and gang bangers don’t use credit cards to buy guns and ammo. Just another way of vilifying law abiding citizens,” gun rights activist Cesar Cordova stated in a tweet posted on Monday, The Daily Mail said in its report on the matter.

“If they can’t take your rights away by force of government, they’ll do it through their woke corporations instead,” a post from Dave Kellogg of Indianapolis, Indiana read.

“Major credit card companies, including Mastercard, Visa and American Express, announced last week that they would create a new coding system for all firearms purchases in the United States. That will help track suspicious purchases, such as the one in the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where Salvador Ramos purchased his weapon using a bank card,” Newsmax reported.

“Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock spent $95,000 on guns in the year before the shooting that killed 60 people in 2017. The policy is expected to start in the coming months, The Daily Mail reported,” Newsmax stated.

Visa came out and announced it would be playing a rousing round of “follow the leader” on Saturday when it came out and stated they too would be accepting the policy. The policy itself will separate gun purchases into a category of its own for U.S. gun shops as a means of separating pistol and rifle sales from other kinds of retail groupings, namely those in the sporting goods arena.

“This will likely put pressure on the banks as the card issuers to adopt the standard as well, NPR noted. Visa acts as a middle man between merchants and banks, and it will be up to banks to decide if they will allow sales at gun stores to happen on their issued cards. Mastercard said it will support lawful purchases while protecting the privacy and decisions of individual cardholders,” the report said.

So what happened to make these giants in the credit card industry suddenly decide to run with this plan? Well, two of the nation’s leading and largest public pension funds, located in California and New York, applied a rather substantial amount of pressure to the credit card companies to create separate sales codes for any sort of purchase related to firearms that could potentially flag suspicious buys or race how guns and ammo are being sold.

It’s a sneaky way of creating a gun registry is what it is. Rather than using the federal government to create one, the left is now using private companies to do their dirty work. This is a major infringement of the Second Amendment and is something we have to legally fight back against. If we fail to take proper action, these companies could end up successfully creating a registry the left uses against lawful gun owners in the future.