NY Times Report Pushes Credit Card Companies To Monitor Gun Buyers

 

The New York Times published an article on Monday suggesting that credit card companies surveil cardholders who purchase firearms.

The NYT piece, authored by Andrew Ross Sorkin, noted that a number of mass shooters purchased their weapons and ammo using credit cards. Banks are required to alert federal authorities to purchases exceeding $10,000, but there are rules preventing them from seeing precisely what goods users are purchasing.

Nonetheless, NYT’s Sorkin suggests that banks track purchases at sporting goods stores and gun shops and prevent cardholders from purchasing multiple firearms “in a short period of time” and report unusual spending patterns.

 

Visa, Mastercard respond:

“We do not believe Visa should be in the position of setting restrictions on the sale of lawful goods or services,” Amanda Pires, a Visa spokeswoman, told NYT. “Our role in commerce is to efficiently process, protect and settle all legal payments. Asking Visa or other payment networks to arbitrate what legal goods can be purchased sets a dangerous precedent.”

MasterCard similarly touted the “privacy of [cardholders’] purchasing decisions.”

 

Progressives know no bounds to their greed. Greed for power, for coercion, for curtailing of civil liberties, for pressuring others to do their bidding, for tyranny.

 

Here.

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Adolescent Pot Use in Post-Legalization Colorado and Washington Not Rising

Jacob Sullum:

According to the most recent numbers, the rate of past-month marijuana use among 12-to-17-year-olds was a bit lower in 2016-17, after three years of state-licensed sales (and four years of legal home cultivation in Colorado), than it was in 2011-12.

His conclusion:

I have to say I am rather surprised by these numbers. I was never comfortable with assurances that legalization would not lead to more underage use. While it’s true that licensed marijuana merchants, unlike black-market pot dealers, actually card their customers (and anyone who has bought marijuana in Colorado or Washington can testify that the stores take that responsibility seriously), it seemed to me that leakage from the adult market might very well make pot more readily available to teenagers, resulting in more cannabis consumption. So far it hasn’t happened, maybe partly because legalization made marijuana less appealing to adolescents—a reversal of the “forbidden fruit” effect.

 

Bill Maher Lashes Out At Democrats For Over-Regulation: “It Makes People Hate Us, It Makes Me Hate Us”

Yes! HBO Real Time host Bill Maher arguing for freedom to make choices in our lives.

“Until then all this will accomplish is to feed into the Republican message that Democrats don’t want to help people they just want to micromanage their lives,” Maher said. “It makes people hate us. It makes me hate us. And it prompts kickback.”

You bet your a$$ it prompts kickback, at least from me.

“I don’t want to let the right-wing own freedom,” Maher said. “People want to drain the swamp, not ban Big Gulps. Yes, I understand, you have a thousand good ideas for how I should live my life, check my privilege and sort my recycling. I will get to that. But first we need to get some Democrats elected and that’s hard when the movement to childproof the world has made Republicans the party of freedom and Democrats the party of poopers.”

With you on this, Bill. Here. I’d love to see more competition between the political parties over more freedom.

NFL Players’ Protests

Yes, I admit, it bothers me that athletes show disrespect for the values of the U.S by kneeling or doing something other than the rite before a sporting event.

There are two problems, though, that also bother me. 1) The National Anthem can be interpreted to pay homage to the state, as if it were a god.  To some people it is, but not to me. And, 2) as expressed by Don Boudreaux. How about the politicians:

who regularly disrespect the Constitution by ignoring and violating it.  Where’s the criticism of members of Congress who mock the Constitution by pretending to find in that document the authority to do what that document does not authorize them to do, such as (to pick only a few examples) subsidizing farmers, using tax dollars to fund a government-run pension scheme, preventing workers from agreeing to work at hourly wages below a government-set minimum, and restricting the amount of resources that private individuals may contribute to political campaigns?  In this light it’s fair to ask: Do professional athletes who refuse to stand for the playing of the national anthem undermine and ‘disrespect’ America’s core values anywhere nearly as much as these values are undermined and disrespected by the countless government officials, elected and appointed, who daily act in disregard for the Constitution that each of them took a solemn oath to uphold?

Here.

President Trump To Declare Opioid Crisis a National Emergency

NPR:

President Trump says he is ready to declare the nation’s opioid crisis “a national emergency,” saying it is a “serious problem the likes of which we have never had.”

President Trump is showing he is a progressive and getting sucked into the swamp. Progressives left and right declare “War on something” where that something is whatever fits. Trump’s declaration is a variation on the War on Drugs. His adminsitration was clever enough to avoid the same “War on” label but its the same thing.

The War on Drugs initially by President Richard Nixon and US Congress and continued: Fail. The legalization to varying degrees by states of marijuana and the ease of availability suggests this failed also.

The U.S. also had the War on Poverty by President Lyndon B bing-bing-bing, Johnson and US Congress: Fail.

In the decade following the 1964 introduction of the war on poverty, poverty rates in the U.S. dropped to their lowest level since comprehensive records began in 1958: from 17.3% in the year the Economic Opportunity Act was implemented to 11.1% in 1973. They have remained between 11 and 15.2% ever since. It is important to note, however, that the steep decline in poverty rates began in 1959, 5 years before the introduction of the war on poverty (see figure 4 below).

Expect more aggressive policing, arrests, headlines, wasted tax money, civil liberties violations, larger bureaucracies in government and elsewhere, and failure.

Czech Parliament to European Union: We’ll Defend Ourselves with Guns

ILYA SHAPIRO: As a wave of Islamist terror attacks sweep across Europe, London police urge people to “run, hide, tell”. The Czech Republic’s response? Fight back.

Gun-free zones create easy targets, disgruntled employees, disgruntled whatever, nut jobs, terrorists, you name it. By contrast, if you can carry a weapon legally and conceal it on your person or nearby, the would-be perp will not know who is carrying but will know that it is legal to do so. And the odds have now shifted.

Story here.

LA LGBT Group Embraces Guns

Jonathan Fischer is never sure who’s going to be more surprised when he, as he likes to put it, comes out of the gun closet — the gun aficionados who find out he’s gay or the gay friends who find out he likes shooting guns.

When the 38-year-old television editor showed up last month to a defensive handgun class near Piru with a Glock 27 pistol on his hip, he wore a T-shirt sporting a rainbow-colored AK-47. His “gay-K-47,” he said.

There are dissenters to letting LGBT people carrying guns.

“Some people say you need a gun to protect yourself from the bad guys. We just fundamentally disagree with that,” said Rick Zbur, executive director of Equality California. “We don’t want to live in a world where you have to be packing heat to live your daily life.”

How whimsical. This is not a realistic sentiment. People who crave stability and control need to face reality. There are too many actual events of random violence to remind people  who think differently then Mr. Zbur of the desire to defend themselves with a firearm.

“Even during our heightened days of civil disobedience and protest, we have only advocated peaceful means, never arming ourselves and retaliating with violence,” said City Councilman John Duran, who is gay.

Carrying a firearm is not retaliating with violence if you’re being violated first. It defending oneself. When one finds oneself in a potentially threatening situation, merely brandishing a firearm could stop the assailant, then again it may not in which case the next step is needed. Depending on the situation, that could mean informing the assailant that he may be hurt if he does not back down.

I fine with it Jonathan. Anything that’s peaceful.

Here.