Tennessee: Gun Owner Financial Privacy Legislation Headed to Governor Lee

[JohnHurt]

Friends,

This thread is not about guns...

From the National Rifle Association:

Tennessee: Gun Owner Financial Privacy Legislation Headed to Governor Lee

Last week, on April 1, the House passed House Bill 2762 by a 75-17 vote, providing critical financial privacy protections for gun owners. The companion bill, SB 2223, passed the Senate a few weeks ago. HB 2762/SB 2223 will soon be presented to Governor Bill Lee for his signature.

HB 2762/SB 2223 prohibits payment processors from using firearm/ammunition-specific merchant category codes. This is an important protection for gun owners, protecting private purchasing information from abuse by third parties. Anti-gun activists in states like California have already mandated the use of these codes, and it is important that Tennessee takes this critical step to protect financial privacy.

In Fall 2022, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) approved a Merchant Category Code (MCC) for firearm retailers. MCCs are used by payment processors (like Visa and Mastercard) and other financial services companies to categorize transactions. MCCs enable payment processors and banks to identify, monitor, and collect data on certain types of transactions. Before the ISO decision, firearm retailers fell under the MCC for sporting goods stores or miscellaneous retail.

Collecting firearm retailer financial transaction data amounts to surveillance and registration of law-abiding gun owners. Those promoting these schemes, in turn, support this type of intrusion, and it should be presumed that the goal of this program is to share all collected firearm retailer MCC data with government authorities and potentially private third parties that may include gun control organizations and anti-gun researchers.

NRA would like to thank House Speaker Cameron Sexton, Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally, Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson (R-SD 27), who sponsored the Senate bill, Representative Rusty Grills (R-HD 77), who sponsored the House bill, and all our members and fellow Second Amendment advocates who engaged to keep the bills moving through the legislative process in both chambers.

Continue to check your inbox and www.nraila.org for updates on your Second Amendment Rights and hunting heritage in Tennessee.

This legislation at the State level means that every bank in the country will not be able to use these new firearm codes to track gun purchases if the buyer or seller is in Tennessee, or the transaction occurred in Tennessee.

The place where the transaction occurred may not be obvious. If both the buyer and seller were from Kentucky, but met and sold a gun at a gun show inside Tennessee, then the collection of the new data codes would be prohibited. So you can't just "look at their home address" to see if the collection of data is prohibited.

That is a lot of programming overhead. Credit card swipe devices are attached to your cell phone, and can be anywhere. The cell phone location data would have to be passed to the Credit card processor, with the firearms code if outside TN, and without the code if in TN. If you were standing on the border of TN and KY with a cell phone swipe device, you would need GPS to determine in which state the transaction occurred so that the proper code could be delivered. And it starts with the cell phone. Wow!

The cell phone swipe programs would have to be updated. The transaction records transmitted to the banks may need new fields, for passing the information for "in TN" or not. There may need to be a database conversion in every bank. That is a LOT of money.

This law in Tennessee means that the banks may find it too costly, or not beneficial to start using these new codes, and so may not comply at all in collecting this data - at the national level. A real monkey wrench in the machine.

This thread is not so much about tracking firearm sales, but the ability of a single state to thwart a nation-wide initiative - an initiative that is coming from the special interest groups, and not from the Federal government.

I find that amazing. If you have other examples where a single State or group of States have overturned an initiative like this, I would be interested in what you say.

This may be the solution to stop the Central Bank Digital Currencies. Not holding my breath, but it could.

John

[RZehr]

I thought this plan to give firearm purchases their own code was already given up.

[Josh]

May I propose discussion of pending legislation move to “Politics”?

[Josh]

I thought this plan to give firearm purchases their own code was already given up.

It keeps coming up over and over. The anti-gun lobby keeps pressuring payment card processors (Visa etc.) to not allow firearm transactions. Apparently, they think it’s better for firearms to be sold in back alleys for cash…

[Ken]

Yet more evidence that owning guns makes people afraid of their own shadow. I expect the same people who obsess about this sort of thing are the same ones who think they need to conceal carry a Glock in order to safely run to the grocery store for a carton of milk.

In any event, credit card transactions are coded by the type of merchant, not the type of sale. If I go to my local Fred Meyer and buy a pair of pants, a hammer, and a can of paint it gets categorized as "grocery store". If I buy a TV and box of tools off of Amazon it gets categorized as "book store" and so forth.

[Josh]

Yet more evidence that owning guns makes people afraid of their own shadow. I expect the same people who obsess about this sort of thing are the same ones who think they need to conceal carry a Glock in order to safely run to the grocery store for a carton of milk.

In any event, credit card transactions are coded by the type of merchant, not the type of sale. If I go to my local Fred Meyer and buy a pair of pants, a hammer, and a can of paint it gets categorized as "grocery store". If I buy a TV and box of tools off of Amazon it gets categorized as "book store" and so forth.

It’s not “paranoia”. The anti gun lobby has been working for a while to make it harder to buy guns with a credit or debit card.

Do you think it’s a good or a bad thing to force gun transactions to be all cash?

[RZehr]

Yet more evidence that owning guns makes people afraid of their own shadow. I expect the same people who obsess about this sort of thing are the same ones who think they need to conceal carry a Glock in order to safely run to the grocery store for a carton of milk.

In any event, credit card transactions are coded by the type of merchant, not the type of sale. If I go to my local Fred Meyer and buy a pair of pants, a hammer, and a can of paint it gets categorized as "grocery store". If I buy a TV and box of tools off of Amazon it gets categorized as "book store" and so forth.

So what do you think a gun store would be proposed to be newly coded as?

[Ken]

Yet more evidence that owning guns makes people afraid of their own shadow. I expect the same people who obsess about this sort of thing are the same ones who think they need to conceal carry a Glock in order to safely run to the grocery store for a carton of milk.

In any event, credit card transactions are coded by the type of merchant, not the type of sale. If I go to my local Fred Meyer and buy a pair of pants, a hammer, and a can of paint it gets categorized as "grocery store". If I buy a TV and box of tools off of Amazon it gets categorized as "book store" and so forth.

So what do you think a gun store would be proposed to be newly coded as?

I think now they are categorized as sporting goods. I expect the ones that are exclusively gun shops would be recategorized as gun stores or some such. But if you go buy your guns at Cabella or Sportsman's Warehouse it would still just be classified as a sporting goods store.

Credit card transactions are classified by the type of merchant not the type of purchase. This is all kind of pointless anyway since if the authorities have your credit card records they can still see if you shopped at any actual gun stores regardless of how the transaction was actually coded by the credit card processor.

[Josh]

The proposals were to require firearm purchases to be specially coded (credit cards have information called “Level 3” data that bears a wide variety of information about a purchase).

Citation: Used to spend a lot of lonely evenings in a building in Ashburn…

[Ken]

The proposals were to require firearm purchases to be specially coded (credit cards have information called “Level 3” data that bears a wide variety of information about a purchase).

Citation: Used to spend a lot of lonely evenings in a building in Ashburn…

Actually you are wrong. The proposals were to simply categorize gun shops as gun shops and not sporting goods stores.

Level 3 data processing is something else completely. Most point of sale credit card terminals don't do level 3 data transactions anyway. Level 3 transactions require detailed information about the items bought, quantities, units of measure, UPC code, etc. Since level 3 transactions already collect the UPC code for purchases they already know exactly what the item is. If you buy a weapon or box of ammo from a vender doing Level 3 data collection they already know exactly what the item is from the UPC code.