Democrats have been making some gains in the New Hampshire legislature over the past few election cycles, but they haven’t managed to wrest control of either the House or Senate away from Republicans. If that ever happens, we can expect an avalanche of gun control legislation to start pouring down on the state’s legal gun owners, but for now the statehouse is still more amenable to protecting the right to keep and bear arms instead of trying to take it away.
In late June lawmakers gave their final approval to H.B. 1186, also known as the “Firearm Purchaser’s Privacy Act.” The votes were closer than we’d like to see; 14-10 in the Senate and 190-179 in the House, but that was enough to move the bill to Gov. Chris Sununu. A few days ago the governor put pen to paper and signed the bill into law, making New Hampshire the 17th state to prohibit the use of merchant category codes for gun stores.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation applauded Sununu for enacting the legislation, with NSSF Government Relations – State Affairs Managing Director Jake McGuigan calling it a “a necessary tool to protect the Second Amendment and privacy rights of New Hampshire citizens from unlawful intrusion on their private purchases”.
“Law-abiding gun purchasers in the ‘Live Free or Die’ state won’t need to worry that ‘woke’ Wall Street banks, credit card companies and payment processors will collude with government entities to spy on their private finances for exercising their rights. No American should fear being placed on a government watchlist simply for exercising their Constitutionally-protected rights to keep and bear arms.”
Gun control activists claim that the use of the codes can help credit card companies and financial institutions identify “suspicious” transactions, which are supposed to then be reported to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network for further investigation. But as critics have pointed out, the MCCs don’t detail what was purchased (nor should they), which makes them useless in uncovering potential crimes.
As NSSF pointed out, FinCen has already “admitted to U.S. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) in a letter that it violated the Fourth Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens that protect against illegal search and seizure when it collected the credit card purchase history from banks and credit card companies of individuals who purchased firearms and ammunition in the days surrounding Jan. 6, 2020,” and that was before these MCCs came into existence. Imagine the abuse that could take place if banks and credit card companies started reporting every person who made multiple purchases at gun shops over a short period of time, or those who bought big-ticket items with their credit cards.
Thankfully, New Hampshire gun owners don’t have to worry about that any longer. Like residents in states like Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Iowa, Kentucky, Wyoming, Indiana, Utah, Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Texas and West Virginia, their Second Amendment privacy is now protected by law. Similar legislation is still pending in Congress, and if Republicans can take control of the Senate and the White House while keeping their majority in place in the House, we should be able to put these protections in place nationwide.
