This thread is not about guns...
From the National Rifle Association:
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.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.
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