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Major credit card companies are making it easier to track gun sales
It has been a continuing trend, post Heller, that the gun-control activists of the culture war is seeing far more administrative sallies than legislative or judicial wins. This same pattern has recently begun to expand into private enterprise, as noted above.
One does wonder, however, if this is in fact wholly organic activism. The current administration is headed by one of the individuals in office during Operation Choke Point, in which federal agents used back-channel pressure to force payment processors to bend to their will without judicial oversight. This pattern was recently repeated (allegedly) on a wholly different culture war front. Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson claims that the White House was using back-channel demands to twitter employees to ban him from the service.
If this is true, it's an interesting culture war development. "It's a private company" is a common retort by the side in power whenever the side that is not in power complains about corporate censorship. That fact may be true, but in cases like Operation Choke Point, the State Actor concept starts to rear its ugly head. How much pressure can the government apply before the "private companies" in question are acting under duress, and as such, acting as state actors? How naked must the threats be before it's a demand, rather than a friendly suggestion?
I'm not terribly worried, for some reason, probably because my first reaction was immediate skepticism that the data would be meaningless for the stated goal--there'd be no signal to actually mine from it.
Of course, if the goal is to create a corporate-side version of a national gun registry, that'd be another thing, especially given the want for algorithmic analysis.
But that gets me to another thing, something brought up in the documentary Killswitch: the NSA's data-collection program was not only unethical, it was likely ineffective for its purported goals. "More data" is not a cure for a lack of information in of itself--you simply expose yourself to more noise. Now, again, if AI were to get involved, that would be something else, but an AI that can process massive amounts of data at a feasible speed and deliver good and accurate recommendations based on its analysis might just well be near to a god, and at that point, we'd have other problems.
My personal guess is that a year or two down the line, activists and congressmen will "suggest" that payment processors treat those as high risk categories and demand higher fees. They did the same thing with porn.
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This is just . . . something I don't get? The data's going to follow a random curve; how can you tell whether a surge is really a surge or just noise? (Not to mention the sale of the gun could take place many months prior to the shooting, or not even take place on traditional finance payment processor networks at all, or the many other problems with this . . .)
I've never really put much stock into the "it's a private company" retort and always considered it a semantic stop sign meant to justify the speaker's position from whole cloth. Just because a company has the legal right to do something doesn't mean that they (morally) should. Ironically enough, this argument is often invoked to dunk on people arguing for freedom of speech, along the lines of "just because you can legally say something doesn't mean that you should". Regardless, as Scott Alexander points out, there's not a meaningful difference between coercion by the state and coercion by private entities, so any debate that focuses on the legal status of the entity carrying out the action in question (except as to answer a strictly legal question) misses the point entirely.
Look, just couple weeks back the US president declared most Republicans to be a 'national security threat'. Obviously a prelude to re-starting the war on Terror but this time against domestic political enemies.
If credit card companies know who buys guns, when things start getting spicy and a gun buyback / ban comes into effect, credit card companies can just start freezing accounts of people who look like they're harboring illegal guns.
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If the stated purpose doesn't make sense, it's likely that the stated purpose is not the actual purpose. It does make sense when government and social pressure previously forced credit card companies to charge vendors higher rates if they sell certain product codes.
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It's an obvious lie. A mass shooter purchasing two guns is just random noise in the great scheme of things. But it's a great way to build a database of gun sales. "Mr. C.G. HLYNKA has spent over $5000 or new firearms last year, here's the list of all people like him, Mr. Cooper".
But I think it's not enough. What the US needs is a switch to electronic receipts. Do you know how much paper is wasted on printed receipts every day? Here's a nice system by the Treasury Department which replaces paper receipts. It's smart enough to cross-reference the data from different shops and payment processors for your convenience: you can give the shop one of your emails, or phone numbers, or just a credit card number, it will recognize it's you and show you all your expenses in a single convenient location.
I have exactly zero desire for such a system for my personal expenses and an exceptionally large negative desire for anyone else to have that data. Personal financial management products are a niche market with most of the growth in things like robo-advisors for investment accounts rather than Mint mobile style phone photo receipt tracking (which even then targets small businesses more than individuals).
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Some past conversation on this topic. I'll also point to the Times in terms of where gun control advocates want this to go next:
And, more subtly :
Senator Warren, while better known for a hilarious incident involving a genetics testing kit, is also a member of the Senate Banking Committee, and chair of the Subcommittee on Economic Policy.
And an absolute inveterate powermonger. She's the type of progressive who would have sided with the original technocrats more than a century ago: She believes wholeheartedly in the unlimited good that smart, well-educated, well-intentioned people can do when given as much power as they want to accomplish that good.
When designing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, her bill intentionally placed it in the Federal Reserve -- which is self-funding -- so that Congress could not ever defund it. This was also the bill that created an appointed administrator for the CFPB who could not be removed by subsequent Presidents, something that was struck down as unconstitutional.
If she's involved with this, it is not a benign change.
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