Credit card companies will now track gun store purchases, causing mixed reactions

After recent pressure by a group of Democrats, Credit card companies Visa, Mastercard and American Express have said they will implement steps to help better track firearm sales.

A recent letter, was drafted by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) and signed several more colleagues, asking the CEO’s of Visa, Mastercard and American Express to take these steps.

“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 said.

A panel of the International Organization for Standardization voted to create a “merchant category code” (MCC) for gun retailers, and all credit card companies have agreed to the change.

The implications of this are that gun stores will no longer be categorized as, for example, specialty retailers, which can make it easier to track expenditure on firearms.

Supporters of the movement praised this as a necessary step to stop gun violence.

“Until [this decision], gun and ammunition stores did not have a unique merchant category code,” Mahen Gunaratna, chief public affairs officer of Everytown for Gun Safety, said on Twitter. “Now banks and credit card companies can more easily report dangerous and potentially illegal gun purchases to law enforcement. “

“We now turn our focus to how it will be implemented by merchants and their banks as we continue to support lawful purchases on our network while protecting the privacy and decisions of individual cardholders,” Mastercard said in a statement.

“This is exactly how we would manage the process for any other appropriate MCC, like a bicycle shop or sporting goods store,” they went onto say.

However, gun rights advocates have hit out at the decision, with the National Rifle Association (NRA) saying: “The ISO’s decision to create a firearm specific code is nothing more than a capitulation to anti-gun politicians and activists bent on eroding the rights of law-abiding Americans one transaction at a time.”

“This is not about tracking or prevention or any virtuous motivation — it’s about creating a national registry of gun owners,” the NRA spokesman went on to say.