Biden Set Up an Illegal National Gun Registry With Help From Your Bank

As a lawyer who has studied constitutional law extensively, I have always been impressed with the Second Amendment: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

That provision is breathtakingly clear. Anti-gun advocates have tried to point to the “well regulated Militia” preamble to somehow limit the right to bear arms to state military units. But that was not the intent, and not what the framers believed.

The Militia clause is what lawyers call precatory language, meaning helpful but not essential. The idea that armed citizens might join a militia is fine, but militia membership was never a condition of owning arms in the first place. The courts have ruled consistently along those lines.

This does not mean the right to own and bear arms is absolute. No rights are absolute. All rights clash with other rights from time to time, and it’s the job of the courts to strike a balance.

Citizens are not allowed to have working artillery pieces or Abrams tanks. Machine guns and noise suppressors are legal but require special permitting that can be quite expensive.

The real fear of gun-owning Americans is not that they couldn’t own pistols, revolvers, shotguns, and long rifles. The fear is that the government would create a national gun registry with the owner’s name, address and serial number of every weapon in the country and would simply confiscate all of the guns and ammo at once in a blatant extra-legal attack on the Constitution.

Despite that fear, the Biden administration has found a way to create just such a registry using your local bank and credit card company.

When you charge anything on a credit card, a product code is used to identify the item purchased in broad terms. This includes categories such as “groceries,” “sporting goods,” “clothing,” and many others. Guns used to be included in the category of sporting goods, but there was no way that MasterCard or VISA could differentiate between a fishing rod, a kayak or a rifle unless there was a customer dispute.

Biden required MasterCard and VISA to create a special code for guns so that the government would have something tantamount to a national gun registry without gun owners actually realizing it. (Of course, one solution to this is simply to pay cash for your guns).

This article describes the efforts to use merchant codes to construct gun registries in great detail. It also describes the efforts of state legislatures in the U.S. to help stop this violation of the Second Amendment. Unfortunately, it also describes how those efforts may be crushed by the Biden administration gun control fanatics.

This battle is far from over. The best approach now is to hang onto your guns, buy news ones with cash, and wait for cooler heads (or the courts) to prevail.

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