It’s just a pause, but the news is welcome. I don’t think Visa and Mastercard understand the American gun-owning consumer very well. They stand to lose a lot of revenue as we just use cash.
Visa and Mastercard paused their decision to start categorizing purchases at gun shops, a significant win for conservative groups and Second Amendment advocates who felt tracking gun shop purchases would inadvertently discriminate against legal firearms purchases.
The move is a setback for gun control groups. They say categorizing credit and debit card purchases might help authorities see potential red flags — like significant ammunition purchases — before a mass shooting could be carried out.
After Visa and Mastercard announced their plans to implement a separate merchant category code for gun shop purchases, the payment networks got significant pushback from the gun lobby as well as conservative politicians. A group of 24 GOP state attorneys general wrote a letter to the payment networks threatening legal action against them if they moved forward with their plan.
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In a statement, Visa indicated that the legal pushback was partially the reason it paused the implementation.
“There is now significant confusion and legal uncertainty in the payments ecosystem, and the state actions disrupt the intent of global standards,” the company said.
Visa and Mastercard have said the gun shop categorization was a decision out of their control. The International Organization for Standardization, better known as ISO, is the group that categorizes merchant codes and Visa and Mastercard were just following their decision, the companies said. Gun control advocates lobbied for the change to ISO, not to Visa and Mastercard.
The whole thing was pushed by the Amalgamated Bank (NY) which is owned by Big Labor and is not a large entity whatsoever–except for its reach into the Bai-Den administration through (among others) the murderer Trumka’s son who wants to take away gas stoves.