Bipartisan Senate group proposes ‘no fly, no buy’ gun measure

[Bob Butler 54]

(02-22-2018, 04:10 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: opinion piece from the New York Times:


How Banks Could Control Gun Sales if Washington Won’t

For the past year, chief executives have often talked about the new sense of moral responsibility that corporations have to help their communities and confront social challenges even when Washington won’t.

In the aftermath of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 students and staff members — and at a time when Washington shows little interest in limiting the sales of assault weapons — there’s a real opportunity for the business community to fill the void and prove that all that talk about moral responsibility isn’t hollow.

Here’s an idea.

What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?

Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand.

PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.

“We do not believe permitting the sale of firearms on our platform is consistent with our values or in the best interests of our customers,” a spokesman for Square told me.

The big financial firms don’t even have to go that far.

For example, Visa, which published a 71-page paper in 2016 espousing its “corporate responsibility,” could easily change its terms of service to say that it won’t do business with retailers that sell assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, which make semiautomatic rifles fire faster. (Even the National Rifle Association has said it would support tighter restrictions on bump stocks.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/busin...sales.html

This would open the door to eco-politics.  If you are open to blue values, you do not do business with those who hold the red.  I remember in the 1960s the echo of one set.  Why did my hometown of Rockland MA have two hardware stores, two cloth stores, two butchers, etc...  There was a quiet agreement that the Protestants would use one set of stores, the Catholics the other.  It was a form of institutionalized prejudice, of keeping the communities separate.  The south had a similar set of paired stores for blacks and whites.

This separation by religion and race has been abandoned these days.  I do not approve of the attempt to reconstruct it.  If taken to the extreme, could such prejudice be outlawed?  Is separate but equal by politicized values a more acceptable form of prejudice than race or religion?  Should it be considered the equivalent of the jury nullification laws in the north before the Civil War.  It was impossible then, no matter the evidence, to return slaves to their rightful owners in the south as the Constitution said.  Under the theory of the times, juries were the People's way of telling the established government that their laws were unjust, and slavery was one such law that the People might choose to ignore.  The Establishment has of course tried to change the interpretation.

Gun laws today are similar.  Liberal and progressive have conflicting beliefs.  The blue wish to change the beliefs and behaviors without changing the base law.