Category: All About Guns
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Washington, DC –-(AmmoLand.com)- According to an exclusive story published by AmmoLand News, the ATF is about to force millions of gun owners to register their pistol braces as short-barreled rifles, which will then be regulated by the National Firearms Act.
To be clear, this is exactly the type of jack-booted thuggery we’ve come to expect from a morally bankrupt federal agency, which has outlived its usefulness.
According to the AmmoLand News story, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) calls their monumentally stupid idea an “amnesty” because they won’t charge the normal $200 fee for an NFA tax stamp.
Wow. How magnanimous.
Of course, the Bureau’s new rule negates and invalidates all of their previous opinion letters, which told us it was perfectly fine and absolutely legal to install a pistol brace on our guns.
In other words, they told us we wouldn’t have to worry about politically motivated enforcement actions like this if we bought a brace, and an estimated 4 million plus people did.
Then, after Joe Biden declared war on guns, the ATF changed its mind and bent over. Now 4 million law-abiding folks are about to pay a steep price and face having their names entered into a national gun registration database.
What does this have to do with reducing the skyrocketing violent crime rates plaguing Democrat-run cities across the country? Absolutely nothing. This is just another way for the Biden-Harris administration to screw over legal gun owners.
In fact, this won’t impact criminals at all – it won’t even slow them down. Do you think Joe or Kamala actually believe criminals will register their braced pistols? Of course, they don’t.
Once Biden shuffles off into history, I hope his replacement takes a hard look at the utility of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) because I certainly don’t see any. They have yet to focus on getting guns out of the hands of criminals because they’re solely focused on persecuting the law-abiding.
This plan could turn millions of gun owners into felons overnight. There’s a word for a law or rule that instantly criminalizes the law-abiding – tyranny – and tyranny is what we’ve come to expect from the ATF.
About Lee Williams
Lee Williams, who is also known as “The Gun Writer,” is the chief editor of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project. Until recently, he was also an editor for a daily newspaper in Florida. Before becoming an editor, Lee was an investigative reporter at newspapers in three states and a U.S. Territory. Before becoming a journalist, he worked as a police officer. Before becoming a cop, Lee served in the Army. He’s earned more than a dozen national journalism awards as a reporter, and three medals of valor as a cop. Lee is an avid tactical shooter.
Merchant category codes are made up of four digits and are used across all sorts of industries as a means to classify retailers, while not revealing individual product purchases. Credit card companies currently lump firearm retailers in with other outlets, classifying them as either “5999: Miscellaneous retail stores” or “5941: Sporting Goods Stores.”
With a new code for firearms merchants, potentially suspicious purchasing patterns could be flagged to law enforcement — much the same way banks and credit unions made more than 1.4 million suspicious activity reports in 2021 for other types of transactions that might suggest anything from identity theft to terrorist financing.
This is part of a plan being pushed by congressional Democrats after Amalgamated Bank of New York, a progressive bank that often involves itself in social issues, made repeated attempts to push for the new code, all of which were denied.
A group of congressional Democrats is urging credit card companies to track suspect firearm and ammunition purchases as a means to identify and stop gun crime, according to a letter obtained by CBS News Thursday.
The letter, drafted by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania and signed by over a dozen of their colleagues, urges the CEOs of Mastercard, American Express and Visa to back the creation of a merchant category code for gun and ammunition retailers — a measure the industry had initially resisted, according to an investigation by CBS News in June.
“The creation of a new [merchant category code] for gun and ammunition retail stores would be the first step towards facilitating the collection of valuable financial data that could help law enforcement in countering the financing of terrorism efforts,” the letter says.
So it looks like the congressional pressure worked. The new code has been approved but it sounds like Visa is not happy about it even as the CEO of Amalgamated Bank is celebrating.
In a letter obtained by CBS News, sent by Visa on Wednesday in response to congressional Democrats who supported the plan, the company said, “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.”
Visa wrote, “We understood Amalgamated Bank’s request to be justified, at least in part, by an interest in blocking transactions that would fall under such a new category, and Visa’s rules expressly prohibit blocking of legal transactions under an MCC.”…
“We all have to do our part to stop gun violence,” said Priscilla Sims Brown, President and CEO of Amalgamated Bank. “And it sometimes starts with illegal purchases of guns and ammunition. The new code will allow us to fully comply with our duty to report suspicious activity and illegal gun sales to authorities without blocking or impeding legal gun sales. This action answers the call of millions of Americans who want safety from gun violence and we are proud to have led the broad coalition of advocates, shareholders, and elected officials that achieved this historic outcome.”
Priscilla Sims Brown recently appeared on CNBC where she was asked about her effort to push the new category code for guns. “If we did have a merchant code for gun stores we could detect patterns that would indicate that there had been something unusual going on,” Brown said. She says all the banks will do is file a suspicious activity report at which point it would be up to local or federal law enforcement to act on those reports (she wasn’t very clear about who would be doing the follow up).
If that’s so, why is Visa concerned about attempts to block transactions using these codes? I just checked and so far Elizabeth Warren hasn’t posted any tweets celebrating this outcome. She’ll probably get around to it this weekend.
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