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Notes -
Major credit card companies are making it easier to track gun sales
It has been a continuing trend, post Heller, that the gun-control activists of the culture war is seeing far more administrative sallies than legislative or judicial wins. This same pattern has recently begun to expand into private enterprise, as noted above.
One does wonder, however, if this is in fact wholly organic activism. The current administration is headed by one of the individuals in office during Operation Choke Point, in which federal agents used back-channel pressure to force payment processors to bend to their will without judicial oversight. This pattern was recently repeated (allegedly) on a wholly different culture war front. Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson claims that the White House was using back-channel demands to twitter employees to ban him from the service.
If this is true, it's an interesting culture war development. "It's a private company" is a common retort by the side in power whenever the side that is not in power complains about corporate censorship. That fact may be true, but in cases like Operation Choke Point, the State Actor concept starts to rear its ugly head. How much pressure can the government apply before the "private companies" in question are acting under duress, and as such, acting as state actors? How naked must the threats be before it's a demand, rather than a friendly suggestion?
This is just . . . something I don't get? The data's going to follow a random curve; how can you tell whether a surge is really a surge or just noise? (Not to mention the sale of the gun could take place many months prior to the shooting, or not even take place on traditional finance payment processor networks at all, or the many other problems with this . . .)
I've never really put much stock into the "it's a private company" retort and always considered it a semantic stop sign meant to justify the speaker's position from whole cloth. Just because a company has the legal right to do something doesn't mean that they (morally) should. Ironically enough, this argument is often invoked to dunk on people arguing for freedom of speech, along the lines of "just because you can legally say something doesn't mean that you should". Regardless, as Scott Alexander points out, there's not a meaningful difference between coercion by the state and coercion by private entities, so any debate that focuses on the legal status of the entity carrying out the action in question (except as to answer a strictly legal question) misses the point entirely.
Look, just couple weeks back the US president declared most Republicans to be a 'national security threat'. Obviously a prelude to re-starting the war on Terror but this time against domestic political enemies.
If credit card companies know who buys guns, when things start getting spicy and a gun buyback / ban comes into effect, credit card companies can just start freezing accounts of people who look like they're harboring illegal guns.
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