South Dakota Senate Votes to Prohibit Gun Store Merchant Category Codes

When the first hints of there being a potential for a new merchant category code for gun stores that would allow credit card companies to track that you’ve made a purchase at such a place, a lot of people were…let’s just call it “concerned,” and for good reason.

Such a thing would make it possible to put together a partial list of gun owners, which would be awfully convenient if the government decided it needed such a list.

It’s not like credit card companies are going to stand on some kind of principle and destroy those records or anything, especially when the codes were proposed explicitly as a way to track people who were buying guns–ostensibly to identify mass shooters, but the problem is that mass killers aren’t doing anything that regular, law-abiding citizens aren’t doing too.

A number of states have moved to ban the practice, thankfully, and South Dakota just took a serious step in the same direction.

A bill passing the Senate reverses a federal rule that allows the use of a firearms code for transactions involving firearms, accessories, components and ammunition.

It comes after some debate from gun control advocates in recent years.

The bill’s prime sponsor – District 24 Senator Jim Mehlhaff – called it the “finest piece of legislation” this year.

He said the bill comes as a quick solution to a recent issue.

“Now we aren’t bringing this bill to stop a behavior that’s been going on for decades, or even just years. This is something that reared its head sometime in September of 2022 when the Internation Organization for Standardization – the ISO – approved a merchant category code specific to firearms and firearm retailers in order to record all firearm and ammunition transactions,” Mehlhaff said. 

Now, the bill moves to the House where it will probably pass, which is a very good thing for all of us.

Right now, it’s shaping up to be a case of there being two kinds of states: Those that ban merchant category codes for gun stores and those that require them.

However, if enough states prohibit them, then those from states requiring them can just travel to another state, buy a gun–which is legal so long as the dealer follows relevant laws in the buyer’s home state–and then buy a gun without it showing up to the credit card company.

Unfortunately, some dealers don’t want to fool with having to jump through the hoops imposed by another state, but others are willing to do so. The thing is, the merchant category code isn’t quite the same thing as requiring a permit-to-purchase or something like that. That’s something that applies to the gun store itself, which means it shouldn’t be tracking those purchases at all, regardless of where the person gets their credit card bills.

Once enough other states ban then, then the codes are even more useless than they already are, since they can just track the kind of store and not what’s actually going on at the point of sale.

Good on South Dakota.