
How Banks Could Control Gun Sales If Washington Won’t - jonwachob91
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/business/banks-gun-sales.html
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teuobk
Cash purchases are already pretty common for gun sales. All gun retailers
accept cash, obviously, and many of the smaller ones offer discounts for
purchasing with cash (usually framed as an extra 3% or so fee for purchasing
with a credit card). The tinfoil-hat crowd is also fond of purchasing with
cash, and many person-to-person gun sales are done on either a cash basis or
as a miscategorized PayPal transfer.

~~~
slivym
Well firstly let's not disregard a proposal that could greatly diminish bad
gun sales simply because it doesn't eliminate them completely.

This mechanism is more than just stopping an individual sale. If a store sells
a certain class of products, they won't be able to accept credit cards at all.
As you say, plenty of people will be able to just go get cash out, but how
many people will just go down to the store down the road which will accept
Amex? 5%? 10%? 30%?

How many stores can afford to lose that business to their competitors?

The result is that you'll likely end up with all large gun stores not stocking
these items. You'll have a few boutique stores that can't take card, but do
have a wide selection of more powerful weapons and then they can explain when
99% of school shooters get their guns from these 1-2% of gun shops.

~~~
LyndsySimon
> How many stores can afford to lose that business to their competitors?

I'm confident that dropping credit cards would result in less business lost
than dropping standard-capacity magazines.

> The result is that you'll likely end up with all large gun stores not
> stocking these items.

Can you name some "large gun stores"? I know of a couple online, but I also
know that the sets "customer who buy 'assault weapons'" and "customers who buy
from large retailers" are very nearly disjoint.

> You'll have a few boutique stores that can't take card, but do have a wide
> selection of more powerful weapons and then they can explain when 99% of
> school shooters get their guns from these 1-2% of gun shops.

There are already _at least_ ten million AR variants in the US. They don't
expire.

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peterwwillis
Or, you know, voters could just vote people out of office for supporting the
gun lobby. But I think the author realizes it's a lot easier to use public
pressure by liberal backers to force a subset of private entities who aren't
beholden to the entire public to force their will on everyone.

This idea of using corporations to legislate the nation's woes is not a good
idea. It subverts and undermines the democratic process and makes corporations
the leaders of a plutocracy.

I think people just realize that mass shootings are a small problem nationally
and would take a large amount of effort to solve, and just choose to whine
rather than fix anything.

461 people were killed in mass shootings last year in the U.S. But only 650
were killed in Chicago alone in "regular old murder". When it's poor black
people getting killed, meh, business as usual. But kids? And especially large
numbers of white kids? _Now_ we need to get rid of guns.

Give me a break.

~~~
prostoalex
> 461 people were killed in mass shootings last year in the U.S.

For context, over a hundred people are killed by cars _every day_.
[http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-
safet...](http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-
facts/road-crash-statistics)

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jonwachob91
This seems to be more of a thought exercise than an actual suggestion, and
wouldn't actually slow down/stop the sale of guns. If anything, it'd give the
NRA/gun lobby more power, in that they'd just open a payment
processor/bank/digital coin to conduct the sale of firearms themselves.

~~~
AFNobody
You would think that but there are several larger industries (i.e. porn) that
are attacked in a similar fashion that have not done such things.

~~~
tzahola
Somewhat weakens your argument the fact that we have more porn at our disposal
than ever in the history of mankind.

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vfxGer
I do not want my credit card to offer moral guidance, I want it to buy stuff
were it is convenient. Where will it end, my bank telling me I have bought too
much alcohol this month?

~~~
lykr0n
My thought exactly. My bank should not push their moral compass onto me. I'm
paying them for a service.

~~~
ahjushi
Devil's advocate: are you really paying them for a service? I guess it depends
on if you pay your bill in full each month, but for those that do pay in full,
credit cards provide so many "free" benefits (travel perks, cash back, loss
protection, extended warranties, so on). So for those, credit cards provide
excellent services requiring no payment at all--it could almost be seen as a
club with benefits that one joins, and if that's the case why not impose their
moral compass onto its members (like most clubs do)?

That said, I generally agree with you.

~~~
Tyrannosaur
None of those things are free to me. It's something in the range of %1-%3 of
all I spend. Despite the fact that a lot of the time those charges are hidden
in the price of the items I purchase, I pay them even if I use cash.

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jawns
I always like when op-ed writers point out the main criticism of their
argument before their critics have a chance to:

> The most troubling aspect of having the finance industry try to restrict gun
> sales is that it would push the most dangerous guns into an untraceable
> world where sales would depend on cash. That’s true. All things considered,
> though, it would make it considerably harder to even find such guns.

I have no especially strong evidence to either support or refute the last
sentence, but my gut reaction is that "considerably harder" is stretching it.

~~~
scythe
I don't think that's the biggest criticism of their argument. The real problem
is that if banks are allowed to stop people from buying guns, they'll happily
turn around and use that power to stop people from buying _other_ things, too.
Behind on your mortgage? You probably don't need that bottle of whisky, so
let's deny your purchases at liquor stores...

~~~
trs80
But don't corporations have a moral responsibility to limit our purchases on
these things? _wink_

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mieseratte
Folks give me a funny look when I exclusively use cash. This is yet another
reason why.

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hackeraccount
Isn't this a bit disturbing? I mean, do you want a bunch of credit card
companies making a decision about what you can and can't buy? What if it's
something other then guns?

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whytheam
Banks will always work in their best interests. Until blocking gun sales is
profitable for them, they won't do anything. This is a pipe dream.

~~~
moduspol
Yep. They block Bitcoin purchases on credit cards (read: short term loans from
the bank) because they don't want to be left holding the bag when Bitcoin
prices drop.

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natecavanaugh
I think this could work to limit sales, and I'm actually okay with private
citizens using their leverage to not support something, and I think it could
help with harm reduction.

We've been doing it with cannabis for so long, it has very little likelihood
of political blowback.

I could see this being used and tweaked for a variety of ways. For instance,
those 1-2% shops that will still. Maybe we give them an out where they have a
huge merchant fee for each of those weapons sold, limiting desirability for
those weapons, and if the bank wanted to be really good, use those funds to
work on gun legislation or support groups for victims.

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gwbas1c
And the legal pot business is cash based because banks won't allow legal pot
purchases on a credit card!

If we start requiring credit card companies to judge the morals of our
purchases, we'll start loosing faith in our credit cards.

~~~
rbcgerard
except its not legal in the eyes of the federal government and hence bank
regulators, so not apples to apples.

~~~
gwbas1c
I used to buy pot from CA dispensaries in 2010 on my credit card.

The bigger problem is that the gun debate is too dysfunctional. The whole
premise of this article is an attempt to bypass an important discussion.

Frankly, if we kept the NRA and the "ban the guns" crowd out of the
discussion, we'd solve the problem overnight. Those two parties drown out the
reasonable debate.

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ahtcgytre
Hmmm...can one imagine that New York Times op-ed if a bank said they would
stop processing transactions for some other perfectly legal but perhaps
morally objectionable activities like say abortion clinics?

~~~
gtf21
I was wondering if the slippery-slope argument really held. There's a fairly
simply public-interest argument that could be made against gun ownership (see:
dead schoolchildren all over the US), and this argument has been successful in
many other countries (UK and Australia have both made firearms illegal in most
circumstances).

I don't think you can make the public-interest case against abortion: a very
small number of people would argue that mass shootings are a good thing, but
it is not clear that a large proportion of people (in the UK at least, the US
is a bit of a mystery to me) would argue that the act of abortion does any
damage (or at least, nothing like killing someone).

~~~
AnimalMuppet
There are a large number of people in the US who argue that abortion is
_exactly_ killing someone.

~~~
gtf21
This is true, but I think there are two factors which qualify this argument:

1) leverage / scale (a person with a gun can kill more people in a shorter
space of time) 2) it is contended whether or not this is killing someone,
whereas noone (probably, almost) contends whether a school shooting is killing
anyone

Even with large numbers of people thinking abortion is murder, this is
overwhelmed by the number of people thinking that shooting someone is murder.
Since murder is considered (probably) by a similarly large majority, and a gun
can create more murder than an abortion, you could make a far stronger public
interest case for CC companies to apply pressure to one rather than the other.

~~~
CompanionCubee
There are 664,435 reported abortions in 2013, compared to about 33760 firearms
homicides. There is a scale difference but not in the direction you
anticipated.

~~~
gtf21
While that's surprising, that doesn't quite contradict my point: a firearm has
greater leverage.

The main point is that while almost everyone will agree that murder of humans
is undesirable, not everyone will agree that abortion is murder (_even_ in the
United States), which means that it is not categorically clear that the
outcome of abortion is a negative one, while it is clear that the outcome of a
shooting is a negative one, and therefore there is a stronger public interest
case in applying commercial pressure to sales.

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kyleblarson
If only there were a means of processing a transaction with little pieces of
paper that hold value.

~~~
phil21
I wouldn't expect that to even last in our lifetimes - as a practical matter
at least.

The war on cash is real, and if you pay attention on HN and other places the
social zeitgeist sees this as a good thing.

~~~
airstrike
This may be hard to believe, but there are people out there who have never
heard of HN or similar forums and still love cash.

~~~
gremlinsinc
People I don't think inherently 'love' cash... I mean think of all the germs
on the money you get from a convenience store or McDonalds? I guess a cc can
still have germs, but it's also more convenient to not have to step foot near
a bank to get it.

I know plenty of people who've never heard of HN who use CC and Debit Cards
religiously. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to someday completely
move away from physical cash. From a waste standpoint it makes sense, why
waste money/physical resources just to create fiat currency when it can all be
digitized?

~~~
airstrike
Cash is harder to hack (but perhaps easier to steal?). Each person will have
their own level of comfort with such risks.

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LyndsySimon
This has already been done, at the urging of the fedgov, through "Operation
Choke Point"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point)

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jacksmith21006
I do think this would drive more purchases to Bitcoin and other crypto
currencies.

Which would be even harder to track.

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_eht
It's fine, the Dread Pirate Roberts will accept my crypto currency...

/s

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AncoraImparo
Paywalled to death, can't get near the article.

~~~
trs80
[http://archive.is/uZczA](http://archive.is/uZczA)

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jacksmith21006
Seems like a really good idea. Can't hurt.

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jacksmith21006
Curious why down vote?

~~~
forgottenpass
Your post didn't say anything.

