Laws taking effect Monday in California and Tennessee underscore the country's deep divisions over guns: California wants to help banks track potentially suspicious gun purchases to prevent mass shootings and other gun-related killings, while Tennessee wants to ban the practice.
Major credit card companies must make a merchant code available to gun and ammunition sellers starting today to comply with a new California law that helps banks monitor gun sales and report suspicious cases to law enforcement. The law requires retailers that primarily sell firearms to adopt the code by May 2025.
Democratic legislatures in Colorado and New York also passed measures this year that would mandate gun laws that will take effect next year.
The idea behind a gun dealer code is to detect suspicious activity, such as a person with no history of buying firearms suddenly spending large sums of money at multiple gun stores in a short period of time. Once notified by banks, law enforcement could investigate and possibly prevent a mass shooting, gun control advocates argue.
On the other side of the issue, gun rights advocates worry that the store code could impose unfair scrutiny on law-abiding gun buyers. In the past 16 months, 17 states with Republican-controlled legislatures have passed bills banning or restricting the use of a gun store code.
“We see this as a first step by gun control advocates to limit the legal trade in firearms,” Lawrence Keane, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, told the Associated Press.
California's measure coincides with a separate state law in Tennessee that bans the use of firearm specific trade codeswith the National Rifle Association praising it for protecting the financial privacy of gun owners.
Mastercard, Visa and American Express have teamed up to comply with California's new order, CBS News reports reported earlier this yearThe credit card networks had initially agreed to implement a standalone code for firearms sellers, but put that effort on hold for a moment after objections from gun control advocates.
According to Guns Down America, credit cards are being used across America to facilitate gun violence. According to the company, store codes could prevent straw-fisted violence, gun trafficking and mass-casualty incidents.
A report by the nonprofit identified eight mass shootings that could have been prevented, including Aurora, Colorado, Movie Theater Shooting and the Shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Floridabecause each perpetrator used credit cards to steal huge amounts of loot in a short period of time.
US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy last week called the gun violence an escalating public health crisis. more than 48,000 Americans killed with firearms in 2022.
—The Associated Press contributed to this report.
