OPINION:
Mastercard, Visa and American Express have agreed to comply with a new California law that will allow banks to track guns and ammo purchases.
In other words: tracking you.
For those who hold dear the Second Amendment, this is a privacy nightmare and bureaucratic intrusion on citizen rights — on God-given liberties — that will spread to other liberal-dominated states and result in a national database of gun owners.
Of course, it’s billed as a crime-fighting measure.
“Major credit card companies are moving to make a merchant code available for firearm and ammunition retailers in order to comply with a new California law that will allow banks to potentially track suspicious gun purchases and report them to law enforcement,” CBS News wrote.
Currently, credit card companies lump gun purchases under the same codes as miscellaneous retail or sporting. But by giving firearms and ammo their own separate and easily identifiable code, then — what? Gun-related criminals will be stopped in their tracks?
It’s a ridiculous claim.
It’s stuff and nonsense.
Gang members and sex traffickers don’t use American Express to purchase their illegally owned firearms. Law-abiding American citizens, on the other hand, do.
So what this measure means is that those without criminal intents, those without criminal backgrounds and records and motivations and agendas, are being put in a default category of “suspicious,” in need of verification — in need of government approval for something that is supposed to be a natural right, that is, the right to self-defense, and that is in this country also a constitutional right.
In America, it’s innocent until proven guilty. It’s not guilty until determined by government to be innocent.
Mastercard, Visa and American Express already considered doing this a year ago but put the brakes on due to public backlash. Now it’s back. Now it’s back with an anti-Second Amendment vengeance.
“Gun control activists hope the code, approved by an international organization in 2022 [the International Standards Organization], can be used as a tool to help identify suspect purchases and, consequently, stop gun crime, including mass shootings,” CBS News wrote.
No it won’t.
It can’t.
Gun buyers already have to go through background checks before buying. If the background checks don’t stop mass shooters — who can buy their guns with cash, or buy their guns illegally, or steal their guns from others — then alerting banks to their purchases certainly won’t. And guess what; the gun control activists know this. They know that the tracking of credit card purchases of guns will not lead to any drop in gun-related crimes in America, but rather give law enforcement — government — a handy-dandy database of recent purchasers; a handy-dandy database that will come in handy in the future when and if additional Second Amendment crackdowns are put into play.
The move to track gun buyers nationwide has already begun.
“It’s a start that credit card companies have committed to comply with the [merchant code] law in California,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, said on CBS, “but we need implementation across the country if we’re going to do everything we can to prevent gun violence.”
This measure is a giant leap forward for the gun control tyrants — the eventual creation of a registry of firearms owners that could be accessed nationally. And what the government can access, the government can control.
Perhaps law-abiding citizens in America ought to take a lesson from the criminals and drug cartels and child sex traffickers here and remember: Cash is king.
When it comes to privacy, cash purchases are king.
The loophole with this California credit card company scheme is to take a cash advance and leave the American Express card at home.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.