Posted on 02/21/2018 7:15:34 AM PST by Simon Green
The left doesn’t want you to buy guns. They want to do anything and everything they can to keep you from purchasing firearms through any means available to them.
Normally, this takes the form of new laws that would make it illegal for you to purchase a firearm, but a columnist at the New York Times has a new idea. He wants the finance industry to block you using their cards to buy firearms.
Here’s an idea.
What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?
Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand.
PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.
“We do not believe permitting the sale of firearms on our platform is consistent with our values or in the best interests of our customers,” a spokesman for Square told me.
The big financial firms don’t even have to go that far.
For example, Visa, which published a 71-page paper in 2016 espousing its “corporate responsibility,” could easily change its terms of service to say that it won’t do business with retailers that sell assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, which make semiautomatic rifles fire faster. (Even the National Rifle Association has said it would support tighter restrictions on bump stocks.)
In other words, he wants your credit card company to tell you what you can and can’t use your card for.
What sparky here doesn’t understand is that it then opens a slippery slope for companies to begin to regulate other aspects of your life simply because they don’t agree with them. For example, if a credit card company can get away with blocking you from buying guns, they can get away with blocking you from buying fast food, alcohol, or viewing internet porn.
However, the fact is this won’t curb mass shootings or much of anything else. All that will happen is law-abiding gun owners will then start to use cash to purchase their firearms instead, much as criminals already do. Would-be mass shooters would simply do the same.
What people tend to forget is that mass shootings like Parkland aren’t spur-of-the-moment decisions. They’re planned out long in advance. That means it would be a small matter for them to simply use cash to purchase their firearms rather than a card.
But that’s not what this writer thinks will happen.
You see, he thinks that without credit cards, no one will buy guns. To be sure, it would keep some people from using credit to buy firearms, which might not be a bad thing for some of those folks, but it will also inhibit those who are in need of a firearm right away from potentially getting one. It could cost innocent people their lives, all because someone thinks it’s cute to make it difficult for law-abiding people to buy guns.
Of course, that’s assuming he could get everyone on board. All it would take is one credit card company deciding they like money more than virtue signaling to kill this whole damn thing, which is what would probably happen.
I’d be more indignant about this except I think credit cards are a scam and I haven’t had one in over 20 years. Credit is just another word for debt, and debt is a four letter word. Cash and carry is how I live. If I can’t afford to pay cash for something then I wait until I can.
This would (presumably) also affect debit cards, which do not put one in debt.
Here in Alabama, we legally buy and sell guns at yard sales....zero paperwork.
This is why the Big Brother progressives want to abolish cash.
Conservatives seriously need to get into owning and running financial networks.
Financial networks used to be solely conservative. Remember the stodgy old bankers?
I wonder how he’d feel if banks refused to process transactions for porn instead?
Cash is king, as my dad always said.
You go to a store, buy $500 worth of camping equipment and a $10 box of shells. Is your transaction invalid? If it is and you walk out, what does the store manager think about losing $500 in sales? Some stores would stop selling guns and ammo, wouldn't they?
No cash, no freedom.
When are these idiots gonna learn that there are more gun-owning patriots in this Nation than there are howling bed-wetting leftists?
As if they'd know if you were.
Let banks block money going from the US to Mexico!
Cash is a 4 letter word...
Fair point. I do in fact have two debit cards. However while I believe a bank could, in theory limit the use of it’s credit card, since they are lending you money, I do not think they could legally restrict what you spend your own money on.
I have one credit card, which I pay off every month. If my credit card company tried this nonsense, I would cancel my card. I’m already boycotting quite a few businesses for the rest of my life (TARP/Bailout/etc.), and I’m happy to add more to the list.
I go to my credit card company for convenience, not for politics, same as the sports that I no longer watch. It would be prudent for them to avoid the same fate.
In most cases, one cannot use a credit/debit card to buy illegal drugs. How has that worked out?
Easy, they use their EBT /S
Wish this author would have mentioned the name of the Slimes columnist
Why not just “come upon” this NYT person, somewhere, at some moment in time, reminding him of his ‘freedom of life’?
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