A New York Times conference featured a bank CEO pushing the financial industry to track Americans making purchases at retailers and monitor their “suspicious activity” under the guise of “reducing gun violence.”
Amalgamated Bank CEO Priscilla Sims Brown was the special guest at the Times’ DealBook confab and was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin. He’s the Times’ columnist who previously proposed the gun buying monitoring scheme and spelled out the “next steps” in a column highlighting Sims Brown’s efforts after an international financial standards board adopted her petition to create the tracking codes.
Putting even a little thought to the idea reveals the serious flaws of the plan. Implementing the enormous system to track the private financial transactions will create a myriad of privacy and civil liberty concerns and no doubt is ripe for abuse.
Gun Control Dragnet
Sims Brown lobbied the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to create a gun-related Merchant Category Code (MCC) for credit and debit card companies to use to track cardholders’ purchases of firearms and ammunition. The ISO adopted the proposal and banks are beginning to use them. Listening to Sims Brown forecast what’s ahead, her true gun control aim is revealed. It’s a dragnet for law-abiding Americans.
“We’re at the very early stages of this –,” Sims Brown told Sorkin and the audience. “But as this is implemented, those scenarios will be used.”
By “those scenarios,” she means “detection scenarios” in which a particular purchase prompts a bank to file a Suspicious Activity Report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Here’s how the MCC tracking will reportedly work. Purchases made at retailers selling firearms or ammunition would be assigned the new code for purchases. The MCC won’t identify what is in the customer’s basket, so it could be a total purchase for a firearm and several boxes of ammunition. It could also include a new tent, sleeping bag, propane stove, waders, decoys, blinds and other outdoor gear. The total cost could be flagged as “suspicious” since it might be an outlier on a customer’s purchase history. That doesn’t make it nefarious, though.
Media reported the proposal won’t have its intended effect. “The payment network and its banking partners would have no idea if a gun-store customer is purchasing an automatic rifle or safety equipment,” Bloomberg News reported. Banks aren’t saying what purchases would be “suspicious.”
Just a Steppingstone
The MCC scheme has caught the attention of Congressional gun control politicians. Legislation has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 5764, by Reps. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) and Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) and in the U.S. Senate, S. 3117, by Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). That legislation, The Gun Violence Prevention Through Financial Intelligence Act, would provide banking institutions the cover they need to track purchases by requiring the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to provide “guidance” needed to institute the MCC.
“Financial institutions have a legal obligation… to have programs in place to help detect and report suspicious activity, but they have to know what they are looking for,” Rep. Wexton said.
Rep. Dean has praised the back door gun control effort, too. “Financial institutions already have proven systems in place to identify suspicious behavior and purchasing patterns,” she wrote in a release.
Still no one has offered what “suspicious behavior” or “purchasing patterns” would be flagged. The questions are endless, answers few and the threat to Constitutional rights high.
Trudging Ahead. Trampling Rights.
Sorkin hypes his work in getting the MCC code established. He told the Dealbook audience, “This is an emotional topic for me in many ways… because back in 2018 I started writing about the role of guns in our society… and the role of credit card companies and banks in financing mass shootings.”
Sorkin stated his belief that lawful firearm retail businesses and the already-highly regulated Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) which provide for the legal exercise of the Second Amendment should do their part to create the backdoor database of gun buyers – something Congress is prohibited by law from doing on their own.
“Merchants must start using the code, and not obfuscate transactions by using other classifications,” Sorkin wrote. “Most crucially, the payments industry needs to develop and refine software algorithms for identifying suspicious activity…”
There are those words again – “suspicious activity.”
The suspicion is better reserved for those who would compile lists of Americans lawfully exercising their Constitutional Second Amendment rights. The right to keep and bear arms begins with the ability to make a purchase at the retail counter. Financial industry power players, though, are twisting their roles to facilitate legal transactions into social credit scores that put Americans on secret watch lists.
The financial industry doesn’t need to be suspicious of gun buyers who already are subject to FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) verifications. This move, though, is reason enough for Americans to be suspicious of “woke” banking CEOs doing the bidding of gun control politicians.
Larry Keane is Senior Vice President of Government and Public Affairs and General Counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry trade association.
——————————————————————————– Does anybody remember voting for this guy? I don’t! Grumpy
We spend too much of our time listening without actually hearing, and looking without actually seeing.
This past summer we pulled up to our travel trailer, after dark, and unloaded our two dogs. About the time they got out of the car, the dogs got really upset. They wouldn’t quit barking, they wouldn’t listen to me and they wouldn’t calm down. I figured they were just reacting to a coyote or some other critter in the pasture next to us. Finally, it dawned on me that I ought to find out what they were upset about, and started looking around with my flashlight. Luckily, I found and killed the Mojave rattlesnake before it bit any of us. Col. Cooper would have called me in Condition White, and he would have been right.
Awareness in our everyday lives gives us time to evaluate a situation and prepare to respond to it. Away from home, awareness often helps us spot a potentially bad situation while there is still time to go the other way. Heck, you might even spot the traffic cop while there is still time to slow down and avoid a speeding ticket.
Awareness should be part of the discussion in your family defensive plan. And, it really helps to have friends and family members encouraging each other to be conscious of what’s going on around them. A criminal attack is dangerous, but it should never be a complete surprise. Tune your senses—they are some of the best defensive weapons at your disposal.
If you hang around hunting camp or the shooting range for more than, say, seven seconds, you will soon be regaled with the most outrageous fibs, half-truths, bald-faced mendacities and straight-up Category Five lies ever inflicted on civilized mankind. It’s the nature of our shared passion. Frankly, most of us actually embrace dubious storytelling as a wonderful part of the experience.
In fact, hunters are often chased out of camp by their cohorts brandishing large sticks if they have the temerity to share a tale that includes more than 5% actual verifiable fact. It’s never been done, but if a hunter ever told a shooting-related story that was absolutely true start-to-finish, it’s likely a massive rip would develop in the space-time continuum and we’d all end up exploding into icy clouds of anti-matter.
Therefore, despite my lifelong dedication to “never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” along with my status as a professional writer, I’m going to risk the universe imploding by sharing a supposedly-true story. Though I hang around with hunters, shooters, anglers and other compulsive liars, the person who shared this episode swears and affirms it is true. Where the actual truth lies, I shall leave up to the audience but I will note on humid days my friend did radiate an unusual bouquet, so perhaps there is legitimacy in his claims. Let me explain.
Prelude
The protagonist in this tale shall remain nameless but he is an older gentleman who I’ve known for nearly 40 years. We’ve grown apart over the last decade and haven’t spoken but previously, we spent many years shooting, hunting, fishing and generally committing various outdoor-related outrages together. He is also the person in my life — and we all have one — who can take a simple situation and turn it into a full-blown, four-alarm catastrophe in the name of fun. This was one of those times.
A mutual friend of ours witnessed this incident and told me about it. It occurred sometime in the late 1960s, before I knew either party, and involves a stupid and childish act — of course — but wasn’t illegal and was fairly commonplace at the time.
One fine late-winter day, the person telling the story and my lets-make-matters-worse buddy were driving out to hunt coyotes with rifles. Cruising along the backroads, they happened to spy a large gathering of turkey vultures, also known as “buzzards,” feasting on the odiferous remains of some poor creature that met its demise two weeks earlier on the country road.
Slowing to look upon the group, my friend spontaneously announced he had always wanted a full-body taxidermy mount of a buzzard to grace his home decor. Why this would be a better conversation piece than, say, a nice piece of driftwood or an oil painting remains open for debate to this day.
Before we go any further, we must note the turkey vulture is federally protected under the Migratory Bird Act of 1918, though legal protection wasn’t granted until 1972. Today, like all animals, turkey vultures have advocacy groups and a political action committee in Washington D.C. so please note our admonition: The turkey vulture is a critical part of the ecosystem, a fine fellow and generally misunderstood soul you shouldn’t harm or harass, despite the fact they smell like hot garbage, their vomit is acid enough to destroy car paint and they regularly urinate on their legs instead of bathing. So, regardless of any legitimate aversion, they are illegal to molest without federal permission.
The deed
Showing a critical lack of long-term thinking or any inkling as to how wives and future houseguests might view the acquisition, our heroes unanimously agreed potting the vulture and turning it into an objet d’art was a grand idea. Pulling over to the shoulder of the road, my friend grabbed his bolt-action .22-250, laid it over a weathered fence post and fired. At the shot, one buzzard flopped over as his frightened dining companions took wing.
Our victorious rifleman hopped the fence, walked over to the remains and gingerly picked up the stinking, gore-covered bird. Returning across the fence, the two men discussed what to do with the reeking carcass.
As vultures are known for their normal diet of rotten meat, the witness noted the smell was somewhere between unbelievable and unimaginable.
Because of last-minute mechanical trouble, the pair was driving the car of one of their wives instead of their usual pickup trucks. This meant the only reasonable place to carry the fetid beast was the trunk of the sedan. They figured they could wrap the bird in an old blanket, which they would later burn, and then use some type of disinfectant spray to rid the car of the lingering traces of stench. I’m guessing kerosene.
Satisfied with this dubious plan, the two then drove to another buddy whom they knew was an amateur taxidermist.
At the taxidermist’s home, my friend inquired if it were possible to mount the buzzard in a full, menacing, gothic wing-spread pose. The wildlife “artist” allowed that he could. After a bit of haggling, they agreed upon a price and the three men walked up to the trunk of the vehicle. There was an ominous rustling from inside as my friend turned the key in the lock.
Hostilities Commence
As the trunk lid popped open, the now-conscious and thoroughly angry buzzard stood up like the Phoenix arising to glare at the men. The furious bird then spread its five-foot wings menacingly, squawked loudly and proceeded to vomit with great force and volume.
For those unaware, vomiting is the vulture’s standard first line of defense and they are quite practiced in the art. For what seemed like an eternity, the bird swiveled its head like a lawn sprinkler spewing liquefied roadkill all over the three men and the car.
The smell was excruciating. Most of the trees within 30 feet began shedding leaves and several flying insects died in midair. To make matters worse, in the panic borne of hyper-gagging, my buddy tried to grab the now-apparently-healthy bird by the wings as it continued flopping and spewing the upchuck geyser.
The struggle turned into a short wrestling match with the bird expending its entire arsenal on his hapless tormentor. Locked arm-in-wing, the duo struggled around the driveway in a life-or-death battle as vomit, feces and urine spurted every direction — the majority of which came from the vulture.
The horrific, clinging odor seared every nostril hair within range and in turn each man added their lunch to the gory tableau. The driveway grew slippery with barf and after three or four circuits of the immediate area, the bird and man went down for good.
After several more seconds of driveway grappling, the man finally conceded defeat and curled into a ball in the hopes the whole thing would just be a bad dream — a very wet, extremely smelly, bad dream. His friends didn’t witness this as they were indisposed, crawling on their hands and knees while looking for somewhere cleaner to hurl again.
With this sudden break in the action, the bird took flight with a loud squawk. It was never seen again and no one knows why it flopped over unconscious or if it eventually succumbed to whatever wound it had sustained in the initial encounter. Some believe it just had a sick sense of humor.
Epilogue
In the end, there are several lessons to be learned. First, you shouldn’t shoot vultures because it’s illegal, immoral and serves no purpose, decorating needs notwithstanding. Secondly, if you do happen to need to shoot a buzzard under legal circumstances, as Robert Ruark said, “Use enough gun.” I’d suggest something along the lines of a .458 Winchester Magnum, though my friend now thinks only a .470 Nitro Express safely meets the criteria.
And, most of all, always warn your wife beforehand when the clothes hamper contains an extra-special surprise.
All of these old Civil War artifacts were dug within an hour of where I sit typing these words.
You always assume anything really interesting must have happened on the other side of the world. I rather suspect kids raised in Jerusalem, Athens, or Volgograd feel pretty blasé about their local history as well. However, as a product of the American Deep South myself, there was quite a lot of tragic stuff that once unfolded in my backyard.
Ulysses S. Grant commanded the besieging forces arrayed against Vicksburg in 1863.Confederate General John Pemberton orchestrated Vicksburg’s defense.
It was the early summer of 1863, and America was rabid to tear itself apart. The war had been going on for two long bloody years, and the ultimate outcome was far from certain. Lee and Longstreet were preparing to spend the Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg. Simultaneously some 1,000 miles to the Southwest 70,000 Federal troops under US Grant stood poised to wrest control of a little Mississippi town called Vicksburg from General John Pemberton’s 33,000 Confederates.
Vicksburg’s strategic location overlooking the Southern reaches of the Mississippi River made it a necessary objective for both North and South.
Vicksburg held a commanding view of the Mississippi River, then the equivalent of the nation’s only north-south interstate highway. Pemberton’s Confederates held it. Grant’s Federals wanted it. The stage was set for an epic siege.
The Generals get all of the publicity. However, it is with the nameless little people where the true drama of war is made most starkly manifest.
Rivers of ink have been spilt exploring the innermost thoughts, campaigns, successes, and failures of the Generals. These rarefied military rock stars get all the proper press. However, it isn’t the Generals who typically do the fighting and dying. It is in the small things and the normal folk where the true tragedy and triumph may be found. Such a poignant event occurred on a friend’s plantation just outside Vicksburg proper. The farm and associated holdings have been in my buddy’s family for as far back as institutional memory might span.
The Fog of War
Many antebellum plantations sported palatial mansions for their principal landowners.
This plantation had the poor fortune of hosting the most favorable river landing for Union troops staging for the pending siege. All the local males of military age had long since left to fight. What remained to tend the plantation was the matriarch, the young ladies of the family, and the standard complement of slaves. The entire Neapolitan mob toiled together to fight off rank starvation.
Livestock like horses defined life back in rural 19th century America. To seize a family’s horse could be catastrophic for subsistence farmers.
US Grant himself along with all of his entourage had landed the day before, swept through like locusts, and moved on. One of the young Union officers had a horse that had come up lame. He appropriated another from the family stable but apologized profusely for the imposition. Draft animals in this place at this time could literally spell the difference between life and death, and the young officer did not confiscate this one lightly.
The lone Union officer who arrived the following day was in a foul temper.
As quickly as the Union command group had arrived it was gone, moved on to the more pressing affairs of strangling the population of Vicksburg. The following day, however, there landed a solitary Union officer. He was armed, inebriated, and looking for trouble.
Soldiers throughout history are most typically young and full of vinegar. Without proper supervision, they gravitate toward trouble of their own accord.
This Federal officer was a straggler. The specifics of his story were never known. However, when he realized both the local men as well as his superiors were long since gone he felt it was time to become acquainted with the local ladies.
There resulted a fairly epic showdown at the front doorway to the manor house.
This man carried a .58-caliber single-shot horse pistol as he made his way up onto the expansive porch of the plantation house. The matriarch planted herself in the doorway and forbade him entry into her home. The flower of young genteel Southern womanhood resided therein, and she could justifiably see little good to come from this Yankee drunkard gaining entry. The older woman was of modest build, however, and the younger man fairly strapping. Even in his intoxicated state, it became obvious that he was soon to get past her.
Slavery was an integral part of Southern culture prior to the Civil War. While some slaves were horribly mistreated, others were considered a part of the extended family, albeit involuntarily.
At the same time, the senior male slave was industriously digging a rose bed in front of the house, breaking up the ground with a heavy pickaxe. He was close enough to hear the matriarch’s frantic remonstrations but kept to himself. When the lady of the house planted herself boldly across the doorway the drunken soldier placed his hand on the butt of his pistol. He had traveled far from home to teach these Rebels a lesson, and no slight woman past her prime was going to deprive him of some proper companionship.
More than 600,000 American soldiers perished during the Civil War. One of them died with a pickaxe through his brain on the front porch of a Vicksburg plantation house in 1863.
The family slave then felt compelled to act. While the inebriated Yankee argued vociferously with the lady of the house this man quietly walked up the steps behind him, swung the pickaxe he had previously been using on the rose bed, and buried the spike end up to the handle in the randy Federal’s skull. The Union officer was dead before he hit the porch.
The Gun
Confederates were typically afforded a fair amount of latitude in their dress and weaponry. This may just be the coolest hat I have ever seen.
For many officers serving in the American Civil War, it was a come-as-you-are fight. The Union had the resources to kit out large combat formations in uniform clothing and weapons. Confederates were frequently a more motley mob. However, even Federal officers typically bought their own swords and sidearms.
These old Model 1855 Harper’s Ferry pistols were obsolete at the outset of the war, but they remained in favor for their profound compact firepower. The removable shoulder stock sported a fairly flimsy interface but nonetheless produced a serviceable carbine.
I have seen a photograph of the pistol this hapless Union officer wielded that fateful day back in 1863. As near as I could tell it was a Model 1855 Harper’s Ferry single shot horse pistol. These heavy guns were typically carried across the pommel of the saddle in a symmetrical holster balanced on the opposite side by the gun’s detachable shoulder stock. They were intended to bring down an enemy’s mount if necessary. These .58-caliber guns were evolutionary developments of the original Model 1805 US Marshal Harper’s Ferry flintlock pistols.
This elegant single-shot flintlock pistol was the predecessor to the gun carried by the unfortunate Union officer in our story.
Those earliest guns represented the first design produced by an American national armory. This flintlock weapon was the standard handgun of the American Dragoons who fought during the War of 1812. This same basic chassis was upgraded several times between 1805 and the onset of the Civil War.
One subsequent upgrade was a retained ramrod. In the heat of combat, it was otherwise easy to lose such a critical trinket.
The first .54-caliber M1805 guns were copied from the 1798-vintage French Pistolet Modele An. IX. The final model of 1855 featured octagonal rifling that tapered to a smoothbore at the muzzle. The ramrod was positively retained on a swivel to prevent its loss while reloading from horseback.
The Maynard tape priming contraption, here shown on a Harper’s Ferry rifle, theoretically increased the gun’s rate of fire. Priming was done by means of a roll of paper caps similar to those used by toy cap guns (back when kids played with toy cap guns). In practice, it was fairly unwieldy.
Most of these guns were primed using the notoriously unreliable Maynard tape priming system. They typically launched a 450-grain Minie ball with annular grease grooves. Though clearly obsolete on a battlefield liberally populated with revolvers, these massive guns still offered the sort of knockdown power usually reserved for shoulder arms.
The Rest of the Story
This simple but timeless farm implement made for a formidable and effective weapon.
The matriarch of the family was rendered hysterical by the loyal slave’s spontaneous actions. While she was grateful that he had so ably defended the virtue of the young ladies inside the house, she was also justifiably terrified about what the Federals might do to them all once they discovered the killing. The story goes that the black man retrieved his pickaxe from the man’s skull and casually observed, “Well, ma’am, I’m digging an awful nice rose bed right over there.”
It makes one wonder what other secrets might lie beneath that rich dark Southern soil.
The slave buried the man on the spot before sowing his rose bushes liberally across the top of the grave. The heavy single-shot handgun has since been passed down through the generations all the way to the present. No one ever came inquiring after the fallen Union officer, and I suppose his corpse remains undisturbed underneath that Mississippi rose bed to this very day.
Even two years later the passing Union officer went out of his way to make things right. Handwritten letters like this one represented the primary means of personal communication in this era.
Two years later the war finally ground to its gory conclusion. The Union officer who had appropriated the horse was assigned to occupation duty in New Orleans. He posted a letter back to the matriarch of the plantation once again apologizing for having taken the animal and including fair monetary compensation for the loss. This letter remains in the family today as well.
Ruminations
Second only perhaps to genocide, slavery is arguably the most vile of human institutions.
Most modern students of history weigh slavery as the primary causative agent behind this bloodiest war in American history. The ownership of human beings by other humans is morally repugnant to the civilized mind, so this makes for a reasonable narrative. Interestingly, roughly 90% of those fighting for the Confederacy did indeed not own slaves. However, they were typically young and, like most junior soldiers today, had not the time to accumulate much in the way of possessions.
Those early patriots who evicted this guy, King George III, from America in 1776 would be scandalized to realize how grandiose and expansive the US federal government has become.
The capacity of individual states to determine their own destinies fundamentally shifted with the American Civil War. The founders never could have imagined the ponderous leviathan that the US federal government has become in the modern age. It is the most behemoth undertaking in all of human history. The expansive powers wielded by the US federal government would have been utterly terrifying to men who had staked their fortunes and their lives on an existential fight to throw off the oppressive tyranny of King George III, his intrusive governance, and his onerous taxes.
I suspect once they were done these events made for some mighty fine roses.
The concept of states’ rights died in 1865 along with the doomed Confederate cause. With the benefit of hindsight, this was indeed a modest price to pay to retire the reprehensible practice of slavery. Amidst an entire nation at war with itself, however, one small tragic drama played out on the front porch of a plantation house during a hot summer afternoon outside Vicksburg, Mississippi. This hapless Union officer’s unwitting contribution no doubt enhanced some simply superb Southern roses.
During the 40-day siege of Vicksburg, citizens were reduced to living in caves to avoid the indiscriminate Federal shelling.The highlight of the Vicksburg military park today is the ironclad USS Cairo raised intact in 1964 from the Mississippi River where it sank more than a century prior. It is incredibly cool and definitely worth a visit if ever you are passing through the area.
