DeWine Approves Bill Protecting Gun Owners’ Privacy

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has been a reliable signer of pro-2A legislation during his time in office, so there was little doubt, at least in my mind, about whether he’d back SB 58, also known as the Second Amendment Privacy Act. 

Sure enough, DeWine has put pen to paper and enshrined the bill into law, which means the use of gun store-specific merchant category codes is now prohibited in the Buckeye State, along with any potential insurance mandates for gun owners or the establishment of a registry of gun owners. 

Ohio Capitol Journal reporter Nick Evans took a snarky approach to his coverage of DeWine’s decision, downplaying the need for the legislation. 

Similar merchant code prohibitions have passed in more than 15 other states. But notably, the bill’s sponsors did not identify a single Ohio entity considering an insurance requirement or ownership list. As such, the proposal’s purpose appears geared toward burnishing lawmakers’ pro-gun bona fides. 

Evans went on to argue that “with state law already endorsing stand your ground, arming teachers, and permitless carry”, legislators can now only “chase hypothetical threats to the Second Amendment.” 

I’d say these lawmakers are just being proactive. After all, cities like Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati have a long history of trying to undo Ohio’s firearm preemption law by adopting their own local gun control policies, and it wouldn’t be shocking if one or more municipalities tried to pass a San Jose-style ordinance requiring gun owners to have insurance policies. 

And let’s not forget about the non-hypothetical threat posed by these merchant category codes. Gun control activists claim that the use of these codes can help banks and credit card companies identify and report “suspicious” transactions, but the truth is that these MCCs only tell those companies how much money was spent at a particular store. If high-dollar or frequent purchases are considered “suspicious”, there are going to be an awful lot of false flags raised against responsible gun owners who have no ill intent. That’s one reason why the CEOs of most of these credit card companies were opposed to the idea of gun store-specific category codes, and it helps to explain why more than a dozen states have taken steps to block their use. 

As the National Shooting Sports Foundation pointed out in a press release praising DeWine, the federal government has previously overstepped its bounds in using MCCs to investigate gun owners.

The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) admitted to U.S. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) in a letter that it violated the Fourth Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens that protect against illegal search and seizure when it collected the credit card purchase history from banks and credit card companies of individuals who purchased firearms and ammunition in the days surrounding Jan. 6, 2020. Treasury’s FinCEN had no cause, and sought the information without a warrant, to place these law-abiding citizens on a government watchlist only because they exercised their Second Amendment rights to lawfully purchase firearms and ammunition.

The idea of a firearm-retailer specific MCC was borne from antigun New York Times’ columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and Amalgamated Bank, which has been called “The Left’s Private Banker” and bankrolls the Democratic National Committee and several antigun politicians. Amalgamated Bank lobbied the Swiss-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for the code’s creation. NSSF has called on Congress to investigate Amalgamated Bank’s role in manipulating the ISO standard setting process.

Sorkin admitted creating a firearm-retailer specific MCC would be a first step to creating a national firearm registry, which is forbidden by federal law.

Anti-gun states like California and Colorado have adopted Sorkin’s approach by requiring the use of these codes despite the obvious and fundamental flaws when it comes to using them to find evidence of a crime before one has been committed. Ohio lawmakers should be commended for taking the opposite approach and for taking additional steps to safeguard the privacy of gun owners against both imminent and more hypothetical threats.