Visa and Mastercard along with Discover Financial Services are delaying their plans after an avalanche of bills flooded through state legislatures targeting the moves. The service providers were working on a new merchant category code (MCC) for gun and ammunition purchases.
Discover was to roll out its tracking system in just a matter of weeks.
Visa said in a statement, “There is now significant confusion and legal uncertainty in the payments ecosystem, and the state actions disrupt the intent of global standards. Accordingly, Visa is pausing implementation of the MCC.”
A spokesman for Mastercard said Thursday that “there are several bills advancing in several states related to the use of this new code.” Noting the “inconsistency” that would result in patchwork systems, the company said, “It is for that reason that we have decided to pause work on the implementation of the firearms-specific MCC.”
Anti-gun forces had bullied the measure through the International Standards Organization (ISO).
Proponents claimed the drastic change was to enable monitoring of “suspicious activity” and prevent violence. The truth was that it would spawn wildly inaccurate Suspicious Activity Reports to federal regulators that would likely chill Second Amendment activities.
But pressure mounted by gun rights advocates and upstanding lawmakers resulted in a change of heart by the major credit card companies.
West Virginia state treasurer and Second Amendment advocate Riley Moore called the move “a clear victory for consumers and Americans’ civil liberties. The implementation of this new merchant code would have created a backdoor national gun registry that could be used by the radical gun lobby to undermine Americans’ Second Amendment rights.”
States raced to counteract the coming changes by major card issuers. In West Virginia, legislators in January pushed a bill to ban credit card companies from collecting or disclosing information on firearms transactions.
State officials in Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas introduced similar measures to prohibit companies from implementing the tracking codes.
A bill proposed by state Rep. Jansen Owen (MS) would prohibit payment processing firms from mandating that firearms or ammunition use a specific code in Mississippi that was “separate from general merchandise retailers or sporting goods retailers.”
That legislation, the Second Amendment Privacy Act, alleged that the protocols were simply ways “to conduct mass surveillance of constitutionally protected firearms and ammunition purchases.”
Bills are pending in several states that would ban the tracking of purchases at gun stores, which would have made implementation of the new system even more difficult.
Credit card companies heard from nearly half of the state attorneys general warning that they would act. They told the issuers through a letter that data collected would be misused, intentionally or otherwise.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, who led the 24 states in pressuring Visa and Mastercard, said the companies “came to the correct conclusion. However, they shouldn’t just ‘pause’ their implementation of this plan — they should end it definitely.”
At the moment, the “pause” is a big win for gun rights advocates against a misguided overreach by private industry. It also proves what a concerted effort by a united front can accomplish, even when standing up to billion-dollar industries.
The anti-gun lobby is coming after Second Amendment rights from every conceivable direction, and this was just another attempt to create a de facto national gun registry. But lawmakers saw it for what it was, and at least for now have derailed this latest move.
