In this morning’s DealBook, Andrew Ross Sorkin laments that the House of Representatives has passed a bill, the Protecting Privacy in Purchases Act, that:

prevents credit card networks and banks from using a unique merchant category code, or M.C.C., for firearms retailers.

Instead, gun dealers must be grouped under broader classifications like “general merchandise” or “sporting goods.”

Per Sorkin, this is a problem because it will prevent “common-sense ways the financial industry could help identify suspicious purchasing patterns before mass shootings occur.” He concludes that:

The merchant code may be swallowed up by the culture wars. Proponents of banning use of the code say that it’s a step toward a “backdoor gun registry.”

The “culture wars”? “Proponents say”? “Suspicious purchasing patterns”? A “step toward a ‘backdoor gun registry”? “Common sense”?

My jaw is on the floor. Here is the same Andrew Ross Sorkin, writing in the same newspaper, in the same newsletter, in 2018:

Here’s an idea.

What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?

Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand.

PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.

“We do not believe permitting the sale of firearms on our platform is consistent with our values or in the best interests of our customers,” a spokesman for Square told me.

Gosh, I wonder where the House might possibly have got the idea that allowing credit card companies to track gun purchases could present a substantial problem for the right to keep and bear arms! Could it be from Andrew Ross Sorkin, who, just eight years ago, was openly calling for that system to be implemented so that those same credit card processors could “set new rules for the sales of guns in America” — rules that would, he hoped, go as far as completely preventing “their services to be used for the sale of firearms”? Back then, Sorkin wasn’t even trying to hide that he hoped to achieve via the financial system what he could not get through Congress or the states:

The big financial firms don’t even have to go that far.

For example, Visa, which published a 71-page paper in 2016 espousing its “corporate responsibility,” could easily change its terms of service to say that it won’t do business with retailers that sell assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, which make semiautomatic rifles fire faster. (Even the National Rifle Association has said it would support tighter restrictions on bump stocks.)

If Mastercard were to do the same, assault weapons would be eliminated from virtually every firearms store in America because otherwise the sellers would be cut off from the credit card system.

That is an unmistakable call for Visa, Mastercard, and the other processors to “eliminate” the most popular rifle in the United States. And yet Sorkin now has the gall — the unmitigated brass — to suggest that the House of Representatives is being motivated to act against the very plan that he himself laid out by . . . the “culture war”?

In 2018, Sorkin didn’t stop there. He also mused aloud about the other financial institutions that could choose to undermine the right to keep and bear arms:

There are other sectors of the finance industry that could step up. For example, Lloyd’s of London is the favored insurance company for gun shows. It could pull out.

I am not sure I have ever seen a better example of the cynical games that gun-control advocates like to play than this. First, they demand the abolition of the Second Amendment. Then, when their opponents howl, they dramatically reduce their ask and inquire as to why their critics are so “upset”

Given the sheer brazenness of this move, I can only conclude that Andrew Ross Sorkin believe that his critics are stupid. That being so, let me make this abundantly clear for him: The “proponents of banning use of the code” are not worried about the creation of a virtual “gun registry.” They’re worried that his own plan will be implemented in full. The answer, as ever, is “No.”