Financial Industry’s War on Gun Companies Far From Over

A handful of years ago, it seemed like a single week didn’t go by without someone in the gun industry being debanked. It started under the Obama administration, with Operation Chokepoint, but then got really bad under Biden, particularly with help from New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his pressure on the financial industry, pretty much all of which is subject to New York state law and regulations, thus regulators.

But that’s mostly over, right?

Oh, how I wish.

Future battles for the Second Amendment may be decided in the offices of bank CEOs as opposed to in Congress or courtrooms.

During a speech to the Second Amendment Foundation’s Gun Rights Policy Conference on Sept. 27, Public Square (a company providing payment processing and financial services to companies that are discriminated against by traditional banks and financial technology firms) general counsel Jim Giudice warned that the fight for gun rights would be more about securing access to financial services as opposed to trying to strike down bans on firearms like Glock pistols and AR-15 rifles. In interviews conducted by the Daily Caller News Foundation, the extent of the issues firearms industry-related companies experienced with debanking became apparent.

“I want people to understand the reason why going through the regulatory state and using these other levers of political and cultural pressure is going to be the vector of choice is because we have been so successful in the courts,” Giudice told the DCNF, noting that a “monumental” legal victory was looming when the Supreme Court decides Viramontes v. Cook County, a Second Amendment challenge to a ban on modern semiautomatic firearms.

“What I think is important but also difficult, when folks read about or learn about Operation Chokepoint-type behavior, they can certainly see on its face, okay, this certainly seems like an abuse of government power and authority,” Giudice added. “But for people that don’t live and breathe every day inside of the financial services industry, it can be difficult to really understand. Well, what does this actually mean in practice and then therefore, what do we actually do to combat it?”

It’s most definitely still continuing.

As a free market guy, I’m generally fine with a bank not wanting to do business with a gun company. They should have a right to do business with whoever they want to. Unfortunately, that’s not how this really works. It works because government regulations and regulators are ultimately behind much of what we see happen.

Giudice notes that, for example, a company named Credova that was created to provide financial services explicitly to those in the gun industry that had been shut out by the rest of the financial sector keeps running into hurdles with the feds, many of which are never explicitly stated, creating a kind of Kafka-esque situation where you’re guilty of something, but they’re not going to tell you what. I guess it’s up to them to figure it out.

In fact, Guidice quoted one of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s investigators who flat out said that she didn’t think you should be able to finance guns. Think about that for a moment. This is an investigator who is supposed to be checking into actual rule-breaking, but she’s volunteering that she doesn’t think a company should be allowed to do business because of her personal feelings about how people pay for guns.

Ideally, I don’t think people should finance guns. Not because I think it’s illegal, but because you end up paying more of the gun due to interest and things like that. But I damn sure believe you should be able to do so, particularly if it’s the only way you can afford a gun. At that point, I say have at it.

But for the regulators to be so brazen as to make such a statement tells me they have nothing to fear from their superiors for saying it. That’s a bad sign, and it’s proof that the rot DOGE started trying to purge most definitely needs to continue in the most aggressive manner possible.

People like that don’t need to be in government service.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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