Corporate anti-gun rights activists infringe Second Amendment rights

I carried a gun daily for more than two decades as a police officer, and I still carry daily as a retired American with the constitutional right to do so. I’m fed up with being portrayed as immoral —even evil— because of the tool I’ve used to protect innocents and myself for my entire adult life.

It’s bad enough when leftist ideologues malign and vilify my character both for being a cop and a private gun owner who supports the Second Amendment. But now gun owners have to contend with large financial institutions buying into the anti-gun sleaze, trying to make it harder for manufacturers to finance their businesses and for buyers to purchase firearms.

These corporations can have an enormous effect on our freedom, generally, and on our self-defense rights, specifically, when they decide to throw in with a partisan political ideology that uses fear, lies, and intimidation rather than reason, truth, and persuasion.

It is beyond me how so many supposedly smart people accept that infringing on the gun rights of innocent, law-abiding gun owners has anything to do with a criminal who uses a gun illegally. We should briefly explore this toxic contradiction before we move on.

Let’s say the police arrest your neighbor Adam for committing a mass shooting at a mall. In response, the government then prohibits Maria, your neighbor on the other side, from buying an AR-15 rifle or a magazine that holds more than 10 rounds. How is the illegal act of a lawbreaker in any way associated with the legal act of a law-abider?

The guy who drives a sports car recklessly and kills a family has nothing to do with the gal who drives that same model sports car safely and puts no one at risk. The anti-gun Left wants you to believe their mythology that, somehow, there is a connection. That restricting Maria’s constitutional self-defense rights will keep people like Adam from committing crimes with guns.

Now, back to the subject at hand. Increasingly, a new combatant has entered the anti-gun rights octagon. Corporate banks and other large financial platforms and governments are cutting ties with the gun industry based on the radical, anti-Second Amendment views of their leadership.

State governments are aligning with these institutions and divesting their pension plans of any investments with the firearms industry. Some Democrat-run states are also offering incentives to banks, influencing them to refrain from conducting any financial transactions having anything to do with guns. And their insults to law-abiding Americans who manufacture, sell, and purchase these legal weapons pile up.

An article by Susanne Edward in the NRA publication, America’s First Freedom (April 2020), highlights the issue. She provided this example from anti-gun rights Connecticut State Treasurer Shawn Wooden (D). He manages the state’s public pensions funds valued at $37 billion. Wooden chose two institutions to lead others by voluntarily disclosing “their gun-related portfolios.” Edward writes, “Citibank and Rice Financial Product [sic] ‘both had expressed the desire to be part of the ‘solution on gun violence.’”

Refusing to lend money to the gun industry or process their credit cards is not a “solution to gun violence.” Incarcerating those who commit crimes with guns is a solution to gun violence.

Project Exile, a partnership between the federal government and the Commonwealth of Virginia, was effective in reducing violent crime, but the project itself is what seems to have been exiled.

Project Exile combined federal and state resources to prosecute criminals federally if they committed crimes using guns. Federal trials are often quicker and the prison sentences are harsher than at the state level. However, with the increasingly Left-leaning reluctant-to-prosecute-crime prosecutors being elected to office, such programs are essentially defunct.

This approach, governments pressuring private enterprise to force politically ideological agendas on Americans, is not nuanced in the least. This brazen end-run around the Constitution ploy does not leave any room for looking at guns as anything other than negative.

The government favoring banks that do not deal in any way with the firearms industry presumes guns are inherently evil. Therefore, so are those who use guns even to protect their families and themselves, which is one of the most moral acts a person can do.

Setting aside the minutia and talking points on both sides of the issue, punishing law-abiding people because criminals misuse a product simply falls flat as a solution to anything but obscuring the real issues. However, blaming guns rather than the evildoers does two things: first, it makes liberals feel good about themselves. Second, they have manifested the do-something disease and have done something to show just how much more virtuous they are than you. Who cares whether it works? We had to do something, right?

Edward lists some of the primary culprits engaged in this hate-fest aimed at anything firearms associated. Aside from the companies already mentioned, she listed the following corporations that apparently have little respect for Americans’ right to self-defense: “Salesforce, PayPal, Bank of America, Facebook, Delta Airlines, Stripe, and Dick’s Sporting Goods…”

However, Edward finishes on a bit of a positive note. She notes that other large corporations still do have enormous respect for American liberty, and this is encouraging. “Wells Fargo,” Edward writes, “has remained something of a bulwark against the onslaught.” Anti-gun proponents have condemned the bank, but they’ve held strong and continue to lend to gun manufacturers such as Sturm, Ruger & Co.

In 2019, Wells Fargo issued a poignant statement: “We do not believe the American public wants banks to decide which legal products consumers can and cannot buy.” The company believes it’s in the legislature that changes in laws and policies should occur so the “American public [can have] an opportunity to participate and not be arbitrarily set by a bank.” Both Visa and MasterCard have also committed to a free, fair, and open financial marketplace where customers can purchase legal goods and services.

Under a Biden administration, the anti-gun rights collaboration between a Democratic-Socialist regime and the financial industry will only grow and strengthen. The toxic alliance will work tirelessly to disarm the nation’s law-abiding gun owners and destroy the gun industry by gutting the Second Amendment.

Still, as for former VP Biden and the Democratic Party’s apparent presidential nominee-to-be, and for those other anti-gun rights Democrats who’ve dropped out but still hope for a position in a Biden administration, here’s the mic drop: A President Biden and his comrades would enter their government offices prepared to raise their hands to swear an oath to “preserve, protect and defend” a constitution they don’t believe in.