For a while now, there’s been something of a war going on.
The firearm industry basically just wants to exist while the financial industry has seemingly been doing everything in its power to put an end to the gun industry. After all, you cannot function in today’s society without some kind of financial institution.
One of the shots in this war has been the decision to create a special Merchant Category Code (MCC) for gun stores.
This is really just a back door way to determine who is buying guns and who isn’t, which means it’s a backdoor kind of gun registration.
And that’s why a lot of pro-gun states are banning their use. It seems NSSF has opted to praise Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for his signing of just such a ban.
NSSF, The Firearm Industry Trade Association, praises Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp for signing into law HB 1018, the Second Amendment Privacy Act.
This NSSF-supported law protects the privacy and sensitive financial information of people purchasing firearms and ammunition in The Peach State. With Georgia, there are now 14 states with laws that protect the Second Amendment financial privacy of their citizens.
The law prohibits financial institutions from requiring the use of a firearm code, also known as a Merchant Category Code (MCC), from being assigned to firearm and ammunition purchases at retail when using a credit card. The law also forbids discriminating against a firearm retailer as a result of the assigned or non-assignment of a firearm code and disclosing the protected financial information. Additionally, the law prohibits keeping or causing to be kept any list, record or registry of private firearm ownership.
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The idea of a firearm-retailer specific MCC was borne from antigun New York Times’ columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and Amalgamated Bank, which has been called “The Left’s Private Banker” and bankrolls the Democratic National Committee and several antigun politicians. Amalgamated Bank lobbied the Swiss-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for the code’s creation. NSSF has called on Congress to investigate Amalgamated Bank’s role in manipulating the ISO standard setting process.
Sorkin admitted creating a firearm-retailer specific MCC would be a first step to creating a national firearm registry, which is forbidden by federal law.
Of course, federal law really only applies to the government. If a third party creates a database, such as credit card companies, especially when it’s not officially a database of gun owners and is simply a record of who made purchases at gun stores, well, who’s going to stop them?
However, as each state passes these measures, the ability of the MCC information to really track who is buying what becomes less and less useful to anyone with nefarious intentions.
Even people from anti-gun states can buy firearms in neighboring states, they just have to comply with the laws of their home states in doing so. This means people from states with the MCCs still in place can venture forth from their occupied territories to Free America and purchase a gun lawfully, but without the prying eyes of the anti-gun financial industry.
Again, this helps negate any “benefit” these people might get from these codes, making them useless.
Of course, they were always going to be useless. MCCs are for the type of business, not for the product, which means a lot of people buying stuff for fishing are going to show up as being people frequenting gun stores, for example.
But now, thanks to Kemp and Georgia lawmakers, there’s one fewer state where that can happen.
