The left doesn’t want you to buy guns. They want to do anything and everything they can to keep you from purchasing firearms through any means available to them.

Normally, this takes the form of new laws that would make it illegal for you to purchase a firearm, but a columnist at the New York Times has a new idea. He wants the finance industry to block you using their cards to buy firearms.

Here’s an idea.

What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?

Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand.

PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.

“We do not believe permitting the sale of firearms on our platform is consistent with our values or in the best interests of our customers,” a spokesman for Square told me.

The big financial firms don’t even have to go that far.

For example, Visa, which published a 71-page paper in 2016 espousing its “corporate responsibility,” could easily change its terms of service to say that it won’t do business with retailers that sell assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, which make semiautomatic rifles fire faster. (Even the National Rifle Association has said it would support tighter restrictions on bump stocks.)

In other words, he wants your credit card company to tell you what you can and can’t use your card for.

What sparky here doesn’t understand is that it then opens a slippery slope for companies to begin to regulate other aspects of your life simply because they don’t agree with them. For example, if a credit card company can get away with blocking you from buying guns, they can get away with blocking you from buying fast food, alcohol, or viewing internet porn.

However, the fact is this won’t curb mass shootings or much of anything else. All that will happen is law-abiding gun owners will then start to use cash to purchase their firearms instead, much as criminals already do. Would-be mass shooters would simply do the same.

What people tend to forget is that mass shootings like Parkland aren’t spur-of-the-moment decisions. They’re planned out long in advance. That means it would be a small matter for them to simply use cash to purchase their firearms rather than a card.

But that’s not what this writer thinks will happen.

You see, he thinks that without credit cards, no one will buy guns. To be sure, it would keep some people from using credit to buy firearms, which might not be a bad thing for some of those folks, but it will also inhibit those who are in need of a firearm right away from potentially getting one. It could cost innocent people their lives, all because someone thinks it’s cute to make it difficult for law-abiding people to buy guns.

Of course, that’s assuming he could get everyone on board. All it would take is one credit card company deciding they like money more than virtue signaling to kill this whole damn thing, which is what would probably happen.