It’s a joke to hear virtually any Democrat question President Donald Trump’s state of mind and sanity, especially after hearing some of the things come out of the mouths of the party’s 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls.
If Elizabeth “Fauxcohontas” Warren isn’t falsely claiming she’s a member of some Native American tribe, “Crazy” Bernie Sanders is saying he can implement a government-run healthcare system for 320 million Americans and make “the rich” pay for it. And let’s not forget nearly all 2020 Democrats want to give billions in new handouts to illegal aliens.
Then there’s Robert “Beto” O’Rourke. In a recent Twitter post, O’Rourke, a former U.S. congressman who lost his bid to unseat GOP Sen. Ted Cruz last year, actually seemed to suggest that credit cards are responsible for mass shootings.
No, we’re not making that up.
He wrote, “Credit cards have enabled many of America’s mass shootings in the last decade—and with Washington unwilling to act, they need to cut off the sales of weapons of war today.”
Credit cards have enabled many of America’s mass shootings in the last decade—and with Washington unwilling to act, they need to cut off the sales of weapons of war today. https://t.co/yqLHMF0EWD
— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) September 12, 2019
So what gives? Why is O’Rourke conflating credit cards with mass shootings? Think politics and the strange bedfellows involved in same.
O’Rourke has also been calling on American corporations to step up their own war on guns, “even as 145 of America’s well-known companies ask Congress to take up more gun control,” Breitbart News’ Awr Hawkins reports.
This week the news outlet reported that Bain Capital, Credit Karma, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Doordash, GAP, Levi Strauss & Co., Pinterest, Reddit, Royal Caribbean, Twitter, Uber, and Yelp, and 133 U.S. firms signed a letter to Congress asking for a new law that requires universal background checks — that is, extending a background check to private gun sales between individuals, since all gun sales made by retailers already require running customers through the FBI’s instance background check system.
O’Rourke is just trying to get corporate America to enact gun control
And in March 2018, CitiBank adopted new gun control requirements for customers. Specifically, the policy CitiBank established for “new retail sector clients or partners” include:
— That they don’t sell firearms to anyone who hasn’t passed a background check (already federal law for gun retailers and wholesalers);
— They restrict gun sales to persons under 21 years of age (though the federal law for rifles is 21 and young adults between 18-21 are trained to use firearms in the military);
— They refuse to sell bump stocks or high capacity magazines, the latter of which is an arbitrary decision by a bank stating how many rounds a person needs to defend himself or herself.
Other financial institutions have enacted similar requirements as CitiBank. And now, O’Rourke is pushing for credit card companies to adopt them as well. (Related: Napolitano: Supreme Court has ruled gun ownership is ‘pre-political right’ which is the ‘highest category of liberty,’ so gun bans are out.)
Even so, conflating purchases of guns using a credit card and mass shootings is simply nonsensical. First, there’s no data available to suggest that guns bought with a Visa, Discover, or MasterCard are more dangerous or used more often in crimes than guns bought with cash.
Secondly, hard-core criminals aren’t going to use a credit card to buy guns anyway. First of all, they’d be banned (if the FBI background system worked, which it normally does), and two, they wouldn’t want to establish a record of the sale if they had some nefarious purpose for the weapon.
Can you imagine Mexican cartel members plopping down an American Express card for $4,000 worth of AR-15s? Preposterous.
Finally, what is this business of attaching conditions and rules for the exercise of a constitutional right? Words have criminal implications as well but you don’t see any rational human being calling for curbs on the purchase of newspapers or magazines using a Visa card — yet.
But then again, this campaign season is just getting started, even if O’Rourke’s presidential ambitions are dying quickly.
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