Credit card companies to separately categorize gun store sales

An unnecessary intrusive device IMHO. So if I buy ammo or reloading supplies online, I am going to be reported to governmental agencies? Ludicrous!

That has NO legitimate purpose at all, monitoring criminal activity and violent crimes which is the job of Law Enforcement is one thing, this is 100% improper and should NOT be tolerated. Very few of the Millions of people that own firearms have ever been a problem and this intrusion on their privacy should have no place in our society. It should only take unlawful, violent acts or serious mental health issues identified by Law Enforcement agencies based on actual behavior or acts of individuals to warrant any kind of action and monitoring. The failure here tends to be the broken Court System not performing the duties they should be and that included Judges, ineffective prosecutors some of them that should be monitored for failure to perform their duties and protect the rest of us. I've owned and carried firearms for most of My life going back even to My pre teen days and learned how to carry and use them, safely and have NEVER had a problem with them and certainly don't need to be monitored. I carried a firearm at work for over 40 years of Police and Military service and NEVER had even one improper use of a firearm at work or at home. Another thought, maybe some of these credit card companies should be pursued for excessive interest rates as legalized loan sharks.

I hope they create an ISO code for salt.

Eating too much sodium can lead to high blood pressure. High blood pressure is the leading cause of heart disease. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US. Goes to figure that if we tracked salt purchases than we would know who we could interdict the use of it early and prevent these senseless deaths.

After all, the majority of people buying salt with a credit card will abuse it, right?

I often said of a lot of programs that they are, "solutions in search of a problem". If the solution is "track gun purchases made by credit card", then I can assume the problem statement, "many guns used to commit crimes are purchased by credit card"

I think a lot of this stems from the the New York Times study in 2018 which stated that the guns used in 8 of the 13 mass shootings during the last decade (2008-2018) that killed more than 10 people were bought by credit cards. Their later premise (and other like-minded advocates) is that if the purchases were known beforehand, the mass shootings would have been preventable.

However, I have a few issues with that logic. The first is the salt example above. The assumption seems to be that people buying guns are a threat because obviously, if you buy a gun then you're going to abuse it. Just like salt. The flip to the above problem is "how many gun purchased with a credit card in the last decade were not used in the >10 mass shootings" (the answer is hundreds of thousands).

Second, just coding a sale is not going to do anything. Ok, so you bought $2,000 worth of firearms ... so what? That information has to be passed to someone that has to do something with it. That means it has to go to some organization that then matches that data up to some other database full of information and if any information in those other sources would flag that individual, then I assume some warning bell goes off somewhere and sunglass wearing people in suits would show up and ask further questions.

Coding a sale without turning that information over to a government agency that can match that information with other information is as useful as having some type of security measure in place that is never checked (like putting a lock on a door that is never checked to see if it is locked or a security camera in place but you never look at the feeds). It might make for good historical analysis (Well, the shooter did buy that gun with a credit card), but again, that's not the problem (police easily find that out after the fact as well).

So why isn't all that information matching done with a background check that is required when you purchase your firearm. What exactly is adding the codes that will be given to someone to check further actually doing? DOJ statics show that the overwhelming majority of guns used in crimes are obtained through theft, the black market or from family members.

You may say, "This is going to stop the trade show loophole!" - However, it probably won't. If you don't use a credit card, it won't be tracked so the DOJ statistics come back in play. Additionally, those same DOJ statistics show that less than 1% of guns used in crimes are obtained at gun shows.

Now, on the flip side, where might this be effective? Straw purchases. The ATF says that nearly half of illegally trafficked firearms originate with straw purchaser. Feeding all those purchases by some government organization into the "gonkulator", it's theoretically possible that someone without a gun-dealer license that purchased $150,000 of guns last year would pop out and those same sunglass wearing suit types might pay them a visit to see what's up.

Will I and other law-abiding folks go riot in the streets and have multiple days of burning and looting occurring because they implement this? Hardly. We'll most likely shake our heads at yet another ineffectual virtue signal by a corporation and use cash if we're worried about the credit card companies knowing we purchased a gun.