Exercising the Right
Major Divide Over Tracking Gun Purchases
This column previously reported about how major credit-card companies were attempting to implement a new merchant code for firearm and ammunition sellers that would allow financial institutions to collect data about gun and ammo purchases. Defenders of the Second Amendment rose up in opposition to these plans over concerns that the collected data might be used to enable the government or private entities in their overall quest to further restrict the private ownership of firearms. Multiple Republican-controlled state legislatures passed laws that prohibited the credit-card companies from implementing the code, while many other states are still in the process of enacting such prohibitions. This blowback caused the credit-card companies to back down from their original scheme to implement the code.
But the story doesn’t end there. On March 28, Denver7.com reported that a bill to “require banks and credit card companies to update the merchant code for fire arm [sic] sales” is headed to the Colorado House for a final vote after already passing the state Senate. This Democrat-sponsored legislation would make it mandatory for credit-card companies to do what they were planning to do in the first place. Proponents of the bill insist that their only goal is to alert law enforcement when people are spending large amounts of money on firearms, but that admission reveals that increased government surveillance over firearm and/or ammunition purchases is the goal even though the vast majority of such transactions would be lawful.
Wayne Price, owner of The Gun Room in Lakewood, smells a rat. He asked Denver7, “What is the end goal? What are they trying to do? Why do they want to track that firearm purchase? If a customer comes in, they fill out the paperwork, [Colorado Bureau of Investigations] gives me an approval, FBI gives me approval, I can transfer that firearm to them legally. That’s their Second Amendment Right.” Price pointed out that simply knowing the dollar amount spent on a firearm purchase could be misleading: “There’s people that only collect certain revolvers, certain long rifles and they’re expensive. So if that credit card tracking shows a $15,000 purchase, they don’t know if they bought one gun or 15 AR-15s…. There’s no comparison to the amount spent versus how many guns you get.”
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