Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Anti-gunners know that passing the kind of gun control legislation they want is an uphill battle. They have to take things in small chunks and that’s if they’re lucky. In a lot of cases, though, they haven’t been able to do much of anything over the years.
So, they’re turning to try and find new allies, and they think they’ve found them.
They’re turning to the very people you get to help you buy many of your guns, your credit card company.
Shannon Watts wants to know what’s in your wallet. Even more, she wants what’s in your wallet to decide what you can buy.
Michael Bloomberg’s front woman for his bought-and-paid-for gun control group Moms Demand Action is demanding credit card companies monitor and police cardholder purchases. Specifically, she wants credit card companies to ban purchases of precursor firearm parts. Watts derides them as so-called “ghost guns” and wants to ban their sale. Her claim is that the ATF recovered 10,000 of these “ghost guns” last year, but those included firearms with obliterated serial numbers and older firearms not legally required to serialized.
Here’s the problem. It’s perfectly legal for anyone who can buy a gun to build their own at home. She’s stomping her foot and demanding that credit card companies do what tech companies are doing. She wants them to dictate law and to be the arbiters of what’s legal, of what’s allowed and what rights law-abiding citizens can exercise.
That is precisely what she’s doing.
Of course, this is Shannon Watts we’re talking about here, the woman who got the vapors over a bolt-action .22 rifle. She’s far from what you can call a rational actor when it comes to firearms.
Yet she also has the media behind her, which gives her a fair amount of actual power. Couple that with the financial industry trying to declare jihad against the gun industry and you’ve got the makings of a perfect storm.
What Watts hasn’t considered, though, is that the free market always provides. Let’s say every credit card company jumps on board with this and decides gun parts are a no-go with their cards, someone will step up and fill the void. They’ll do it in a heartbeat. There are options already on the market that would probably love for credit card companies to listen to Watts and company.
They’d capitalize in a heartbeat and make a killing.
Now, do I think it would be necessary? I’d like to say no. I’d love to tell you that credit card companies are going to be interested in profit and they know they make a fairly hefty chunk of change off firearm and firearm-related purchases each and every year, enough so they won’t go down that particular rabbit hole.
However, I also wouldn’t have seen banks sever ties with businesses simply because they’re in the wrong line of work politically, yet here we are.
Watts may well be able to push these companies to do just that, which should trouble the hell out of each and every one of you.
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Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. He also puts out a daily newsletter of non-Second Amendment stories at https://tomknighton.substack.com/
https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2021/01/13/shannon-watts-credit-card/