Next News Network

Democrats are coming for your guns and they’re now trying to use private companies to do their dirty work. House Republicans are pushing back but it may not be enough.

Democrats are once again coming for our freedoms.

According to The Daily Wire. Over 100 House Republicans are demanding answers regarding the controversial classification of gun sales by major credit card companies.

In letters to the CEOs of Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and House Republicans demanded the companies answer questions about their decision to adopt new Merchant Category Codes (MCCs) set by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that would categorize gun purchases separately from other purchases. The Republican members asked the creditors to provide their prospective standards to the public, and questioned whether categorizing gun purchases and flagging law enforcement was an attempt to skirt federal law by effectively creating a gun registry.

Amalgamated Bank, a left-wing activist bank, applied for a separate Category Code for firearm dealers in July 2021. According to Republican members, the ISO rejected the application in October, along with an appeal filed in November 2021. The ISO said at the time that such a narrow category would fail to capture gun sales at sporting goods stores and would place an undue burden on small firearm retailers.

Sebastian Gorka talked to the President of the Crime Prevention Research Center, about how the Democrats plan to track gun purchases.

Both Visa and American Express raised concerns about the effort to establish a firearm-specific MCC. An employee from American Express told CBS News in September, “Specific MCC [codes] in narrow [retail] areas are challenging,” “Managing long lists of narrowly defined MCCs can become burdensome if there isn’t a compelling reason for the long list.”

Additionally, Visa warned against financial institutions acting as moral arbiters. The company wrote in a letter to Congressional Democrats who pushed for the credit card companies to adopt the new standard saying. “We believe that asking payment networks to serve as a moral authority by deciding which legal goods can or cannot be purchased sets a dangerous precedent,”

In June of this year, Amalgamated Bank reapplied for the new MCC. The ISO relented this time, adopting the new MCC. A report by lawmakers noted that Amalgamated Bank “stated its intention to use software to flag allegedly suspicious purchases made by Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights and report these to law enforcement.” “Of course, there is no accepted, consistent, scientific, or legitimate way to determine from this data what is and what is not a ‘suspicious’ purchase. A gun control advocate could view any desire to own or obtain a firearm as per se suspicious. Instead, this is a transparent attempt to chill the exercise of constitutionally protected rights and to circumvent existing legal restrictions on the creation of firearm registries by the government.”

When the government asks private companies to help them monitor citizens, you know something is wrong. Biden’s administration is reaching further and further to take away our freedoms and Americans should be aware of it. If they’re not Biden could get away with this and who knows what’s next