Gun rights, big business, and the conflict thereof

Glock" by mynameisgeebs is marked with CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED.

I don’t trust the government to preserve our gun rights. No one should, really. Even if pro-gun politicians are in the majority at a given point, that doesn’t mean that will be the case indefinitely. One of the biggest mistakes any political party can make, in my opinion, is assuming they’ll never be out of power.

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But I figured for a long time that big business would mostly stay out of the conflict. Sure, some might support gun control groups while others might support gun rights groups–not that the latter has happened so far as I’m aware–but that’s a little different. I didn’t figure they’d take an active part in things.

Yet, they did.

Sen. Ted Cruz and his staff recently discovered Intuit, a financial services provider in Texas, was refusing to provide certain accounting services to manufacturers and sellers of firearms — and of even businesses that make the parts that go into the building of firearms.

Cruz, who is the ranking member on the heads up the Senate Committee of Commerce, Science and Transportation, opened an investigation into the matter, which led to Intuit’s decision to start doing business with gun-related companies again.

But Democrats and their cohorts in business are sneaky devils.

When one door is shut, a window is flung open.

Intuit said its targeted discrimination was due to pressures from Bank of America and JP Morgan — meaning, the net to catch up businesses to participate in the plot to cripple the Second Amendment was cast wide.

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We’ve highlighted a number of cases where the financial industry essentially declared war on the firearm industry.

Yet it wasn’t close to a fair fight. The firearm industry is worth about $28 billion in 2022. The financial services industry, though, is worth around $3.6 trillion.

Moreover, it’s kind of difficult to operate a business without banking of some sort. Especially when you sell items that cost hundreds of dollars or more. A lot of people aren’t going to spend cash, they’ll want to put it on a credit card. Without the ability to do that, gun stores get put in a hurt. Gun manufacturers have even bigger problems because they can’t take out loans for expanding operations, for hiring new people, and so on.

And make no mistake, the financial industry knows this.

This bothers me because I’m a free-market kind of guy. I don’t like private industry being told by the government what it can and cannot do.

Yet on the same token, no one authorized the banking industry to do anything to curtail our gun rights. Oh, in theory, the right would still exist, but if you’re unable to buy a firearm or anything relating to firearms, what rights exist on a piece of paper becomes largely irrelevant.

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Our gun rights matter and no one elected banks to decide if we can actually exercise them.

It’s well past time for this massive industry to be reminded that it can’t decide to curtail people’s rights simply because they don’t personally approve. After all, the banking industry does plenty that most don’t approve of, either.

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