We all enjoy talking about guns, but the fact of the matter is that if dealers, distributors, and manufacturers don’t get paid, we don’t have a gun industry.

It appears that this was precisely the plot of a number of anti-gun financial companies (that just happen to donate millions to anti-gun Democrats) that started several years ago during the first term of “hope and change.”

The April 2012 showdown between anti-gun Bank of America (BOA) and Kelly McMillan of McMillan USA that resulted from this behind-the-scenes battle quickly became legendary.

 He spent 5 minutes talking about how McMillan has changed in the last 5 years and has become more of a firearms manufacturer than a supplier of accessories.

At this point I interrupted him and asked, “Can I possible save you some time so that you don’t waste your breath? What you are going to tell me is that because we are in the firearms manufacturing business you no longer want my business.”

“That is correct,” he said.

I replied, “That is okay, we will move our accounts as soon as possible. We can find a 2nd Amendment-friendly bank that will be glad to have our business. You won’t mind if I tell the NRA, SCI, and everyone one I know that BofA is not firearms industry friendly?”

“You have to do what you must,” he said.

“So you are telling me this is a politically motivated decision, is that right?”
Mr Fox confirmed that it was. At which point I told him that the meeting was over and there was nothing let for him to say.

There was, however, plenty for the shooting community to say, especially Kelly McMillan.

When Bearing Arms spoke with Kelly McMillan last week he said that he still fields emails and phone calls every day about the BOA snub, more than a year and a half later, from other gun industry companies that have been similarly targeted.

The sad fact of the matter is that BOA and other financial services merchants such as Intuit and PayPal have treated other firearms industry companies and customers just as poorly.

The difference between Kelly McMillan and most others that these anti-gun companies have discriminated against is that Kelly McMillan had the means and the determination to do something about it.

That “something” is the just-launched McMillan Merchant Solutions (MMS) a company established with Merchant Services Limited, which now offers credit card processing services to gun companies from a company that will never turn them down for political reasons.

“Yeah, but what does that mean to me?”

Whether you buy online or in the store, roughly 90-percent of sales are conducted with credit or debit cards. By refusing to do business with gun companies, anti-gun banks and processing services were attempting to gut the firearms industry from underneath, making it difficult, if not impossible, for gun dealers to process sales. MMS is coming in to partner with dealers as their credit card processor to key both gun stores and their customers happy.

A third-generation firearms industry figurehead, Kelly McMillan is adamant that McMillian Merchant Solutions is designed first and foremost to give back to and support the gun industry by giving it a sound financial footing, and he’s showing that in unique way. A small percentage of every dollar of revenue that MMS goes to gun rights and conservation groups in order to keep up the fight to defend our Second Amendment rights, and the dealers that use MMS get to pick which one of these organizations that their processing fees supports.

MMS is great for full-time gun shops, but smaller FFLs and accessory makers might not need their kind of service, and they aren’t set up to handle the customer side of transactions the way Paypal is. Paypal is actively shutting down payments for firearms-related transactions, but there is an alternative that is starting to gain traction.

PistolPay is a PayPal replacement made for shooters, by shooters. Ira Goodstadt is a retired firefighter, avid 1911 junkie, home AR-15 builder, and online forum dweller who was attempting to use PayPal to process a forum group-buy from AIM Surplus, when Paypal locked down his account, then his wife’s account, and then finally his daughter’s, because they didn’t approve of what he was attempting to buy.

Tired of being treated as a second-class citizen just for exercising his constitutional rights, Ira and Chapman Ducote, a trigger-pulling friend with financial services background, went to work, and soon afterward PistolPay was born.

The first few months of PistolPay’s existence was slow, due in part to the meltdown of GPal/GunPal, which is either described as being Ponzi scheme or simply incompetent, depending on who you talk to. The GPal/GunPal meltdown made many in the firearms community leery of dealing with a new brand, fearing a scam.

Unlike GPal however, PistolPay operates though a major bank as the depository and Merchant Services Limited handles the card processing (as they do for McMillan Merchant Solutions). After partnering to handle the financial ends of raffles for a number of pro-gun groups ( including the 1911 Addicts forum and One Million Moms Against Gun Control), PistolPay started to gain momentum mostly by word of mouth, and is starting to build relationships within companies within the industry.

You might soon start to see PistolPay appear as a payment option on prominent industry web sites as a payment option.

Financial companies aligned with anti-gun Democrats are trying to hamper or shutdown the firearms industry. Thanks to companies like McMillan Merchant Solutions and PistolPay, their desire to infringe on our Constitutional rights just go that much harder.