Gun law advocates hail new credit card code as a way to cut down on suspicious sales

cnbc ^ | 9/12/2022 | stefan sykes

[bitt]

Visa, MasterCard and American Express said they will implement a new merchant category code for gun retailers.

The International Organization for Standardization approved the code last week.

The National Rifle Association is criticizing the move and says the code is "a capitulation to anti-gun politicians and activists."

Gun law advocates are praising a decision to adopt a new sales code for transactions at gun stores, a move they had urged to help flag suspicious purchases.

Last week, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which sets standards for payment transactions, approved the special merchant code for credit and debit card transactions at U.S. gun stores. Then over the weekend, Visa, MasterCard, and American Express said they would begin using the new code.

John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said the move is a critical first step toward giving banks and credit card companies the tools they need to recognize dangerous firearm purchasing trends − such as a domestic extremist building up an arsenal — and report them to law enforcement.

A merchant category code indicates the types of services or goods sold to consumers. Previously, gun store sales were categorized as "general merchandise".

The attorneys general of New York and California and Massachusetts Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., were among the other notable figures who supported the effort. In New York, dozens of lawmakers had sent letters to the leaders of major credit card companies, urging them to adopt the code.

"When you buy an airline ticket or pay for your groceries, your credit card company has a special code for those retailers. It's just common sense that we have the same policies in place for gun and ammunition stores," New York City Mayor Eric Adams said to the Associated Press over the weekend.

[absalom01]

I think it means they can quickly flag those purchases for the government, give them a list of who’s naughty and nice, according to their values.

 

The information will certainly be used for that, but it's unlikely that is the main reason that the gun control side pressured the IOS into creating these categories.  It's probably more central to their aims (and more dangerous to liberty) as an exetsion of the Obama era "Operation Chokepoint", which attempted to deny financial services to a range of businesses that the regime didn't like.

Having this show up on payment transactions is going to make it trivially easy for payment processors to drop vendors, for gun shops to lose their bank accounts, for on-line sales processing services to deny access, and on and on.  It's just a death by a thousand cuts, progressivily increasing costs and "friction", with the goal of slowly strangling the lawful commerce in arms, as it now appears  they will not be able to legislate gun bans.

[exnavy]

Typical of big gubmint these days. I will not comply.

[DoughtyOne]

Yes, I agree with you thoughts there.