One of the most common arguments from anti–2A zealots, in their first steps toward gun confiscation and bans, is to say that they don’t want to ban guns, they just want to track them, to know where they all are in order to keep them out of the hands of dangerous people. Funny how they aren’t trying to implement that in places like Chicago or Baltimore where more gun crime happens in spite of the strict gun control.
If tracking worked, you’d think that they’d be pushing it there. But they’re not.
That should tell you all that you need to know about what tracking is really about. It’s not about preventing gun violence (if it were, and if that worked, they’d be doing it in those cities). No, gun tracking is about control.
And one of the favorite methods to track legal gun ownership (to keep us under their thumbs as much as possible and to, almost certainly, gear up for future gun confiscation) is to track gun purchases through financial institutions. One state is having none of that, though. Ryan Morgan writes,
Republican Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte enacted a bill last week that would bar financial institutions from requiring that retailers in the state apply a special code to track firearms purchases.
Last year, a committee on the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)—a Switzerland-based organization that sets and monitors quality standards for a variety of industries—voted to establish a new merchant category code (MCC) for firearms. The firearms-specific MCC would allow financial institutions to track gun sales separately from the “general merchandise” category on other retail products.
Gun rights advocates have pushed back against the firearms-specific MCCs, and lawmakers in several states have begun pursuing legislation to block the gun-purchase tracking agenda.
Montana is one such state that has sought to block the firearm MCC with a state bill. The bill states that financial institutions, including banks, credit unions, online payment processors and applications, cryptocurrency companies, and any other institutions providing financial transaction services, “may not require a firearms retailer in this state to use a firearms code that is different from that of a general transaction.”
Good for Gianforte, and good for Republicans in Montana. The people of Montana deserve to have their gun rights protected and to not be tracked by anti–2A nutcases bent on only allowing criminals and the government (some would say they’re the same thing) from having guns.
Now, the rest of the nation needs to do this same thing to put to rest the entire idea of gun tracking here in the U.S.
