A woke Democrat says to jump and, once again, corporate America asks, “How high?”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has long been clamoring to make Visa apply a special label to gun purchases made using the company’s transaction service. Visa finally acquiesced this week, just as MasterCard and American Express had before them. So now, instead of just labeling firearm purchases under the merchant category code of “general merchandise,” Visa will create a special category to make it easier for the authorities to pull out and examine gun purchases amid bulk data on credit card use.
Note that in criminal and civil trials, financial evidence of credit card gun purchases can already be obtained with court approval. That is not at issue here, nor are professional criminals usually in the habit of leaving paper trails behind when they buy guns — they are arguably the least likely of anyone to use credit cards or to buy from licensed dealers.
The official explanation is that this somehow could help prevent mass shootings. But there is no way that can happen unless the police are permitted to look over the shoulders of cardholders as they make gun purchases in real time. Do you believe that the government should be able to monitor all of your purchases preemptively without so much as a warrant? Unless you are willing to accept that sort of intrusion, and most people are not, this explanation doesn’t wash.
The problem here is twofold. First, as they have tried to do with banks and fossil fuel investments, leftists like Warren want to lay the groundwork for bullying companies that facilitate financial transactions out of providing the same convenience to gun purchasers as they do to people who buy anything else. This is a first step toward putting legal or at least social pressure on companies that are supposed to be helping make transactions go smoothly, not making moral judgments about their customers.
Warren’s other insidious goal is to create a framework whereby government can be notified automatically when innocent people purchase guns. The Left has long wanted a comprehensive list of gun owners because without such a thing, gun confiscation, finally something Democrats admit they want to pursue in the long run, can never occur.
Ultimately, Congress and the courts need to establish new, tougher protections for the privacy of financial data. Even before this, government already had far too much leeway in requesting data without any sort of court authorization. But in the meantime, business leaders need to find their spines and start putting their consumers ahead of power-hungry politicians who threaten them with new regulations.
This has become an unfortunate feature of modern woke corporatism. Somebody like Warren makes some threats and then starts to dictate how private businesses are run. This pattern of groveling corporate obedience to Democrats barking orders poses a greater threat to the Constitution than anything else happening in this country today.
