Few people buy guns with cash. After all, guns tend to be rather pricey, and no one wants to carry that kind of money on their person if they don’t have to. Besides, there are a lot of good reasons to use a card of some type to buy a gun than cash.

However, multiple members of the financial industry got together to look at ways they could monitor your gun purchases.

Banks and credit card companies held informal discussions about identifying transactions involving firearms, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Although the discussions resulted in nothing tangible — and ideas may never come to fruition — ideas tossed would help companies monitor gun purchases, which includes information on buyers, from retailers, the newspaper reported.

Financial companies explored the concept of creating a new credit-card code for firearm dealers, similar to how restaurants or department stores identify their transactions, the newspaper reported. Another idea would require retailers to share info about specific firearm products purchases.

Gun rights advocates have expressed fears that storing such data on gun sales could lead to other nefarious activities by powerful entities. The federal government is already limited in their ability to track them, per federal law.

Just because nothing tangible happened, it doesn’t mean we should feel any better about what was attempted.

Let’s be clear here. There’s absolutely no reason on Earth for these companies to monitor whether or not we buy guns. None at all. The ability to track people purchasing guns makes no sense unless it’s part of some other endgame.

Maybe it’s my tinfoil wrapped a little too tightly, but the only reasons I can think of to monitor the purchases of firearms are related to cutting off those purchases completely.

To start with, monitoring those purchases would be a way of gauging the impact of those purchases on their bottom line. It would allow them to see what they would lose if they stopped allowing firearm purchases. Make no mistake, some of these guys may be true believers, but most aren’t going to do anything if it puts a real hurt on the bottom line.

For another, it allows a database to be created of gun owners. While it isn’t foolproof, it allows the creation of a database of people who have purchased guns after X date, which is troubling, to say the least.

Of course,  it could be nothing. There might be some other, some innocent, reason for trying to track gun sales. I’ll freely admit I’m not knowledgeable enough about the financial industry’s inside baseball to have a clue what those reasons could be. I’ll simply acknowledge the possibility that they exist.

But those same financial industry companies also need to understand that there’s a lot of money over here. If you decide you don’t want it, someone will figure out a way around you. Some bank will step up and make it clear they have no issue with our money, or some entrepreneur will figure out a way to bypass the banks completely.

In other words, we don’t need you. It’s just convenient to continue using your services, so tread carefully.