How Banks Could Control Gun Sales If Washington Won’t | Hacker News Reader

How Banks Could Control Gun Sales If Washington Won’t

nytimes.com

34 pointsjonwachob9173 comments

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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...

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.

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.

This has done nothing to stop the spread of porn.

Porn hasn't been attacked by all banks. The article address a few banks/payment processors that have banned the transactions of porn in their Terms of Service, but its still super easy to find a credit card that hasn't banned the purchase of porn.

These have specialized payment processors (ccBill and alike) that filled the gap.

When demand is high - supply will appear

That wasn't done from a moral perspective. That was done because of charge backs.

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

Creating a parallel banking system is purposely difficult, and rarely profitable.

The good Cryptocurrencies seem to be doing just fine for payment processing.

But stepping back and looking at something more traditional. PayPal became PayPal by servicing one group, eBay users. The U.S. gun industry is significantly larger than eBay and could easily support a "PayGuns" business.

I guess thats why bitcoin was such a massive failure...

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?

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

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.

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.

As the article outlines, they already do by not allowing you to purchase cryptocurrencies.

I don't see any logical reason why "I'm paying them for a service" means they can't impose restrictions on the service they offer, except in the case of a monopoly, in which case there may have to be regulations on this.

The cryptocurrency decision was driven by higher than normal share of chargebacks. Even if the consumer is wrong, and bank eventually denies a refund on that BTC @ $16,000 purchase, there are processing and overhead costs that impact bank margins.

Your credit card already does, however.

The two most prominent examples of this would be the PCI cartel cutting off Wikileaks and nearly all online poker sites years ago.

That was done on legal grounds not moral grounds same goes for canabis as it’s only legal on a state level but banks are regulated in a federal level.

Appeal to legality. A similar argument could be made that this would be to stop mass shootings, meaning this bank ban on guns would fall under legal grounds, not moral grounds.

Sadly it can’t because gun manufacturers are legally not liable for shootings this has been argued in court.

Want that to happen change the law.

I'm not entirely sure they should be liable. A car manufacturer isn't liable if someone commits vehicular homicide, and McDonald's isn't liable if someone eats themselves to death with Big Macs.

Your regulators (assuming you bank in the US) disagree with you. Banks have denied service to all manner of people doing relatively innocuous stuff. If the moral compass turns against gun purchasing and ownership sufficiently, there is a banking regulatory model in place to deny credit card processing to armament vendors.

https://www.woodhullfoundation.org/2014/05/07/censorship-by-...

Adult industry historically had higher than normal share of chargebacks. Even though those are free to consumer, they are definitely costing banks.

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.

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...

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

"...considerably harder to even find such guns."

Why does the author suggest that guns would be any harder to find? The gun shops wouldn't close up shop and suddenly go into hiding. They'll just take cash. If the author wants to suggest that banks stop doing business with gun dealers, forcing them to protect their own cash, the market will respond - potentially with new financial institutions willing to do business with them.

Yeah I'm not opposed to the idea of gun control, but almost every proposal I see in the US is a knee-jerk reaction that is completely ignorant of the existing gun situation in the United States. I see people talking about concealing AR-15's being easier in Florida than a handgun. That's because SBR's already require a federal background check with a ~1 year wait and require tax stamp paperwork to remain with the firearm at all times and can't be moved between state lines without prior written approval from BATFE. And they're used in very few murders compared to handguns. But sure, your background check idea is doing something, so you can feel good while posting selfies with reflections of oncoming traffic in your sunglasses. Meanwhile you can make one from unregistered raw materials and minimal tooling and no one would ever know unless you chose to tell them. Let's use the same ideas we used to ban marijuana!

I live in California, where I can't use a credit card to purchase marijuana. It's "considerably harder" to stop by the ATM on way to my local dispensary. Sometimes there is even a line!

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

Like people selling weed for example?

not the same - weed is illegal under federal law

It's actually very similar, just inverse roles. Abortions are illegal under state law, but legal federally. Weed is legal under state law, but illegal federally.

I don’t think so

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

If you don't think bartering doesn't work, I have a shiny diamond ring for you, if you're willing to change your mind.

Sure, I'll take your $10K diamond ring for my $1K gun. Or did you want to chop off the corner?

(more seriously: I think people are going for a substantial reduction in practical feasibility more than anything. The inefficiency of barter is unlikely to affect that.)

While we’re kidding around, once I have your gun, all I need to do is trade a $1 bullet to get my ring back!

Given the fanaticism of the gun debate, if laws don’t prohibit the medium of exchange, you can bet that anything from scrap copper plumbing and wire, to lumber, to livestock would be accepted in some circles, in order to breathe life into a market with enough demand.

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.

Yes, I tend to be one of those people and know many. The difference is they have very little political power. When both the "elites" and suburban America is against you - you likely are not going to have a good time.

Wait, theres a life outside of HN?

Next thing you're going to tell me that not everyone is a programmer...

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?

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

Meanwhile the war on the war on cash is also real.

I am on HN and use cash where possible simply because a set amount of cash in my pocket each pay period is a budgeting system that works for me.

My tin foil millinery habit is entirely unrelated.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

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

Which would be even harder to track.

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

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

http://archive.is/uZczA

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

Curious why down vote?

Your post didn't say anything.

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