Discover will be the first credit card company to start tracking gun and ammo sales.
Starting in April, Discover will have the classification codes in place to allow its network to track purchases at gun stores. Those pushing for this say that they want financial institutions to assist authorities in tracking and monitoring sales of guns and ammunition. The new code will be reported as “5723 – Gun and ammunition shops,” and proponents say that it will help authorities “probe gun-related crimes.” However, there are already mechanisms in place to allow law enforcement to track a gun back to the purchaser after a crime has been committed. This scheme will track the sale of all weapons at the time of purchase, the vast majority of which will never be used in a crime, placing every customer under a cloud of suspicion. It would also drop citizens who purchase automatic weapons and those that purchase safety equipment into the same bucket.
With Discover processing only 2% of credit card transactions (compared to Visa’s 61% share), it would be easy to use a different credit card, but it won’t be long before the other companies follow suit. There is currently (supposedly) no easy way for the government to discover what firearm purchases you made with a simple report. This government/private partnership would change that and is simply one more way that the government is working around existing laws to achieve its goals.
What can be done? A legislator in Florida, State Senator Danny Burgess, has introduced a bill known as “The Florida Arms and Ammo Act“. Officially Senate Bill 214, this legislation will fine credit card companies that track such purchases in Florida up to $10,000 per transaction. “This is the United States of America. You don’t get penalized for exercising a Constitutional right. The Second Amendment is nonnegotiable, and here in Florida, we are going to fight to protect the rights of Floridians,” Republican state Sen. Danny Burgess recently proclaimed.
Where is your legislator on this issue? I have already written my state representative and hope that you will also. The time for just accepting these incremental bindings of our freedoms is over.