Rep. Jennifer Wexton's (D–Va.) "Gun Violence Prevention Through Financial Intelligence Act" would require the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to "request information from financial institutions for the purpose of developing an advisory about the identification and reporting of suspicious activity." The bill's aim is to identify a consistent purchasing pattern among people who buy firearms and firearm accessories in order to conduct "lone wolf acts of terror" and expose how the firearms market in the United States is exploited by would-be mass shooters.
"Banks, credit card companies, and retailers have unique insight into the behavior and purchasing patterns that can help identify and prevent mass shootings," Wexton explained in a statement. "The red flags are there—someone just needs to be paying attention."
Wexton's bill assumes it's possible to tell who is a threat based on tracking credit card activity. Unfortunately, government's past attempts to identify "red flags" by analyzing transaction data has resulted in, as Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown puts it, banks "cast[ing] as wide a net as possible," when deciding what activity gets reported. Banks fear the consequences of being accused of not doing enough to comply with reporting laws and requests. Brown notes that banks' attempts to monitor customers' transaction data in order to identify human traffickers for the government have resulted in the creation of an extremely broad definition of what constitutes suspicious activity, including things like running up large grocery bills and renting DVDs in bulk.
https://reason.com/2019/11/20/new-g...ns-to-report-suspicious-firearm-transactions/
"Banks, credit card companies, and retailers have unique insight into the behavior and purchasing patterns that can help identify and prevent mass shootings," Wexton explained in a statement. "The red flags are there—someone just needs to be paying attention."
The New York Times reports that Wexton's bill was inspired in part by Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin's 2018 investigation on several mass shootings that have happened since the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. Sorkin's work revealed that in at least eight of the 13 mass shootings that killed 10 or more people within that time span, the perpetrators used credit cards to finance their killing sprees. James Holmes, who killed 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, used a credit card to purchase more than $11,000 worth of guns, grenades, and other military gear prior to his rampage. Omar Mateen, the Pulse nightclub shooter in Orlando, Florida, ran up $26,532 in charges across six credit card accounts in the 12 days leading up to his attack.Wexton's bill assumes it's possible to tell who is a threat based on tracking credit card activity. Unfortunately, government's past attempts to identify "red flags" by analyzing transaction data has resulted in, as Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown puts it, banks "cast[ing] as wide a net as possible," when deciding what activity gets reported. Banks fear the consequences of being accused of not doing enough to comply with reporting laws and requests. Brown notes that banks' attempts to monitor customers' transaction data in order to identify human traffickers for the government have resulted in the creation of an extremely broad definition of what constitutes suspicious activity, including things like running up large grocery bills and renting DVDs in bulk.
https://reason.com/2019/11/20/new-g...ns-to-report-suspicious-firearm-transactions/
