The Department of Justice appears to be using its muscle to bully banks into cutting ties with legal industries that it doesn’t personally approve of, and the gun industry seems to be the primary target:

Last year the Department of Justice partnered with the FDIC and the Federal Trade Commission to put a whole host of industries (and their customers) on a “high-risk” list and urged banks to pay close attention to those industries as part of Operation Choke Point.

…

Storefront gun dealers, online dealers and ammunition dealers are on the “high risk” list, along with porn and other salacious products (as if they’re even comparable, the Second Amendment is constitutional right, yet it’s on the DOJ hit list). DOJ argues the program is needed to stop fraud, but that’s a lie. The program is used to target politically inconvenient industries without the permission of Congress.

Fortunately, as Bearing Arms noted last September, a number of pro-Second Amendment companies have stepped up to offer dealers, distributors and manufacturers the financial resources they need.

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.

The Obama Administration has proven time and again that they are willing to play dirty in their attempts to undermine the Constitution, and they’ll use every legal, quasi-legal, and criminal conspiracy they can to do so.

Our best option is to band together and support one another, as McMillan Merchant Solutions and PistolPay are doing. If your local gun dealer isn’t aware of these pro-gun financial companies, you may want to pass along their contact information, just so they don’t get in a bind if Operation Choke Point tries to take them out.