There is a never ending war raging against freedom-loving, American Gun Owners. This time around, it seems as if the government is making it so that the major credit card companies are being forced to use a code to flag a person’s account whenever they buy something at a gun store.
Just so I’m perfectly clear on this, basically your information will get flagged by the credit card companies each time you make a purchase at a gun store using your card. What they do with this info after the fact is up in the air, but I suspect that you’ll go into some sort of database.
This is obviously yet another attempt at creating a gun registry, which is ILLEGAL to do. We have to fight this the only way we currently can, and that’s to spend our money wisely. You can read my views on the Second Amendment by clicking on that link.
And then this one.
When you’re done with that, give this one a read.
If you want the TLDR; Shall not be infringed means just that. And, all gun laws are unconstitutional.
Anyway, let’s discuss this credit card thing further, ending up on how to buy your goods in the future.
Credit Card Crackdown
Going forward I’m personally not going to be paying for any orders using my credit cards, and probably even my debit cards, since they have the Visa logo on them, as well. I urge you to do the same. I’ll get to more details on this a bit later.
I’m not doing this for the same reason as you should, though. Personally speaking, I’m probably already on all of the lists they have for gun owners. After all, I’ve worked as an industry content creator for nearly 10 years now.
My name is all over the place, and they can see every single gun I’ve ever done a review on. Granted, most of them have been sent back to the manufacturer because I don’t have them anymore.
But even more than that, they can see exactly every time I’ve called them out for their anti-freedom, where I stand on the 2A, and that I even publicly called out Trump on more than one occasion because he wasn’t pro-gun enough.
So why won’t I be using my credit cards to buy guns and ammo? Because I practice what I preach.
Going forward, retailers must be more willing to accept alternate forms of payment, besides credit cards, or face the risk of losing business.
Retailers Haven’t Responded
I’ve reached out to a few different retailers to get their thoughts on accepting alternate forms of payment. While I haven’t heard back from some of them, I have heard back from others, and did some other digging to get to my answers.
The retailers either haven’t responded, are blindsided by this, or don’t care. Either way, once the dollars start to slow down because people refuse to be tracked, hopefully something changes somewhere.
My main concern is how retailers are collecting payments going forward. I simply asked if the retailers were open to other forms of payment.
When I say other forms of payment, I simply mean cash, Bitcoin, or something else I’m not thinking about.
Vista Outdoor, who owns Federal Premium, Remington Ammunition, Speer, Blazer, etc., has said they “have no comment.”
“No comment” may just mean that they’re not sure what to do about this yet, or how big of a deal it is. But I can say that consumers don’t want their purchases tracked.
Then, digging around on the Lucky Gunner website, was a little about their payment options. I give them credit for listing the options, but something is going to have to change with their stance.
The following was copied and pasted direct from their website:
Payment Options
What payment methods do you accept?
We accept Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express credit cards. We also accept debit cards that contain one of these 4 credit card endorsements.
We do not accept cash, checks, money orders, or bitcoin/digital currency, nor do we ship C.O.D. (collect on delivery).
Unfortunately, PayPal prohibits the use of its platform to buy ammunition, so we cannot accept PayPal either.
The above statement is obviously going to pose an issue for those gun owners who don’t want to be flagged going forward.
Something will have to give.
The retailers will start to care enough to change the forms of payment they accept once they begin to lose profits because people will stop buying their ammo.
Alternate Forms of Payment
There are plenty of non-gun industry online retailers who offer up alternate forms of payment, and it’s easy enough to do it while staying compliant that any retailer who cares about their customer base should look into doing it.
That’s right, I’m calling you out. If you’re an online retailer of guns or ammo you need to start accepting other forms of payment. Period.
You know us. You know your customer base. We won’t forgive you if you don’t accept alternate forms of payment. We hold a grudge, and we vote with our wallets.
Paying With Cash
If you choose to pay with cash, then you’re currently choosing to go to the store. I strongly urge you to start using cash more often than any other means of payment. You may need to jump in your car and go to the ATM, pull out cash, and then go make your purchases.
You’re harder to keep track of if you do pay with cash, and while it’s not as convenient, freedom is always the best policy.
This is especially true once you begin to realize that you won’t always have the option to pay with cash. They will remove that from us at some point. And when they do, you’ll miss having the option.
Digital Currency
All forms of transacting will be replaced by a digital currency at some point in the near future. The system is already put in place, and it’ll be rolled out starting in 2023.
We won’t be forced to use it right away, but using cash as money will be demonized even further as a slow, dirty payment option that will be eventually completely replaced by this digital currency that magically appears out of thin air.
The odd thing about that, is many folks who work in the money space say that it can also disappear out of thin air if you’re spending your money on things that the powers that be don’t like.
You want to buy ammo? Yeah, they don’t think so. Or, they’ll limit you to 50 rounds per month or something like that. If you don’t believe me, just keep living your life as normal.
When things get to that point, the only real form of anonymous trading that’ll be left is bartering. And at that point, most people won’t part with their freedom seeds because there is no way to replace them.
Proactive Solutions:
I was just getting ready to hit the publish button on this when I saw an email from an online ammo seller called AmmoSquared who just announced that they’re accepting alternate forms of payment.
This is huge, and I’m seriously considering making a purchase just because they made buying ammo anonymous. If I do buy from them, I’ll be sure to write up a detailed review on the process so you know for sure what to expect.
I signed up to be an affiliate of theirs, so if you buy from them it helps us out a lot.
Here is a screen grab and some quotes from their blog post detailing just how they’re tackling this issue:
What we’re doing:
Today we rolled out the ability to fund your account with a check or money order and added placeholders for ACH and Crypto – both of which we are very close to rolling out.
Here is a screen shot of the updated Payment Methods section from the Account Settings page:
You can now send in a check or money order to add money to your account then draw that down over time incrementally. Or just use those funds to buy up on the calibers in your ammo wallet without the recurring component.
ACH is also just around the corner. We were already working on this upgrade, but this news prioritizes this enhancement. This will allow you to pay with a direct link to your bank account. Once it rolls out we hope to be able to do both lump sum and recurring payments, which would completely skip the VISA / MC / AMEX cartel.
Lastly, for those of you with Bitcoin, we’ll be adding crypto to our list of payment options very soon as well.
Read their blog post on this announcement here.
This is a great example for other retailers. Take note.
Conclusion:
It’s always a fight for those of us who love freedom and having the ability to think for ourselves. The gun industry is always under attack, and it’s really time that we start to fight back.
In order to do that, we need our gun industry companies to fight with us. Let’s hope they all respond accordingly.
If they don’t, we’ll need to collectively hit them were it hurts — their wallet.
