Maxon Shooter's Supplies owner Dan Eldridge poses in his store in Des Plaines, Ill., Tuesday, June 25, 2024. A California law taking effect Monday will require credit card networks to provide banks with special retail codes to assign to gun stores. By contrast, new laws taking effect in Georgia, Iowa, Tennessee and Wyoming will prohibit the use of special gun shop codes in financial transactions.
“We view this as a first step by gun-control supporters to restrict the lawful commerce in firearms,” said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry group that backs laws blocking use of the tracking code. Those category lists are distributed by credit card networks to banks, which assign particular codes to businesses whose accounts they handle. Some credit card issuers use the category codes for customer reward points.
At the urging of New York-based Amalgamated Bank, which worked with gun-control groups, the International Organization for Standardization adopted a new four-digit category code for gun and ammunition shops in 2022. Major credit card networks initially said they would implement itMunoz, who helped lead the effort to establish the firearms store code, noted credit cards were used to buy weapons and ammunition for some of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings.
Democratic-led legislatures in Colorado and New York this year also passed firearms code mandates aligned to kick in with California's next May.