Over that past year, organizations executives have sat round tables to encourage companies on taking moral responsibility to assist their communities and deal with social challenges even if lawmakers won’t.
This call to action comes after Parkland, Fla. shooting that claimed the lives of 17 students and members of staff— and at a period when Washington pays no attention to citizens who are begging for control on the sales of assault weapons.
Does the business community have the potential to prove that the discussion about moral responsibility isn’t mere talk?
Ponder over these.
What if bigwigs in the finance sector were to effectively lay down a set of rules for gun trade in the U.S? Can major Credit card firms like Mastercard, Visa, and American Express work together with top card processors like First Data; and big banks like Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase come to the rescue of American citizens?
Together, these corporations have more influence over the firearm industry than any policymaker— and they can easily take the stand.
Let’s flashback to years ago when PayPal, Apple pay, Square and Stripe declared that they would no longer allow firearm dealers to use their services. Most of these firms said the move to stop getting involved with gun sales was in the interest of their customers.
Therefore, these giant financial firms don’t even have to break a sweat.
For instance, what if MasterCard followed in Visa steps? The latter published a paper in 2016 supporting its “corporate responsibility,”—which means Visa could easily, and at any time, amend its terms of service to stop supporting businesses that trade assault weapons, bump stocks, and high-capacity magazines. That way, assault weapons could be removed from nearly every gun store in the U.S. because otherwise, the firearm merchant could have their shut down and be eliminated from the credit card system.
Again, it is quite hypocritical that credit card issuers ban the sale of perfectly legal products like Bitcoin yet they allow citizens to purchase a weapon as deadly as the AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle. Early this year, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America prohibited use of their credit cards to purchase Bitcoin and gun merchant account ther forms of cryptocurrencies.
Americans will be angry to reminded that the same gun type (AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle) claimed the lives of their families in the mass killings in Conn.; San Bernardino, Parkland; Newtown, Calif.; Las Vegas; and in Sutherland Springs, Texas
In conclusion
A deeper look into the way these leading financial companies operate reveals many loopholes in the system that allow successful trading assault of weapons between buyers and sellers. Hopefully, they’ll soon take the moral responsibility they have been talking about.
Author Bio: Electronic payments expert Blair Thomas is the co-founder of high-risk payment processing company eMerchantBroker. His job includes setting up gun merchant account for firearm dealers. Thomas is just as passionate about his business as he is with traveling and spending time with his dog Cooper.
