State Sen. Luis Sepulveda, D-Bronx, speaks during a news conference earlier this year in the state Capitol in Albany. Submitted photo

Some state legislators want to give the New York State Police power to review bulk purchases of guns or ammunition.

Sen. Luis Sepulveda, D-Bronx, recently introduced S.9555 to amend the state Executive Law to give the State Police the power to develop the rules and regulations for such reviews. Sepulveda proposes a new Section 236 of the state Executive Law to empower the superintendent of the New York State Police to establish and maintain within the department a central repository of information regarding firearms or ammunition purchased in bulk for further review within the context of the statewide license and record database outlined in section 400.02 of the state Penal Law.

For the purposes of this section, the term “firearms or ammunition purchased in bulk” refers to “unusually large” purchases of firearms, shotguns or ammunition. The State Police superintendent is also required to adopt regulations prescribing reporting procedures for any purchases of firearms or ammunition purchased in bulk by credit card, debit card, PayPal, e-wallet, e-check, Lyra or any other payment system.

Sepulveda cited a 2018 New York Times investigation that found eight cases when mass shooters used credit cards to purchase large amounts of weapons and ammunition before they committed crimes. Among those instances are the Pulse night club shooting in Orlando, Fla., when the shooter bought two firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition with six different credit cards totaling $26,000 in two weeks. The shooter in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater used credit cards to buy more than $11,000 in guns, grenades, a gas mask and other military gear before that shooting. There have been 13 shootings that killed 10 or more people in the decade from 2008-18, and in at least eight of them, the killers financed their attacks using credit cards. Some used credit to acquire firearms they could not otherwise have afforded.

“Those eight shootings killed 217 people,” Sepulveda wrote in his legislative justification. “The investigations undertaken in their aftermath uncovered a rich trove of information about the killers’ spending on credit.”

The type of review Sepulveda is calling for is reminiscent of calls for credit card companies to separately categorize sales at gun shops. Visa Inc. said in September it will categorize gun sale transactions separately, joining Mastercard and American Express. According to the Associated Press, Visa said it would adopt the International Organization for Standardization’s new merchant code for gun sales, which was announced on Friday. Until Friday, gun store sales were considered “general merchandise.”

“Since banks and credit card companies seem reluctant to help combat their unwittingly financing mass shootings by reporting large purchases of weapons to law enforcement, it is inherent upon the State of New York to take action to protect its residents and review bulk purchasing of firearms and ammunition for potential criminal activity,” Sepulveda wrote in his legislative justification.

According to the AP, Visa’s adoption is significant as the largest payment network, and with Mastercard and AmeEx, will likely put pressure on the banks as the card issuers to adopt the standard as well. Visa acts as a middleman between merchants and banks, and it will be up to banks to decide whether they will allow sales at gun stores to happen on their issued cards.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, dozens of state lawmakers, Attorney General Letitia James, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams are among hte officials who have been pressing credit card comapnies to establish sales codes specifically for firearm-related sales. The AP reported in September that merchant category codes now exist for almost every kind of purchase, including those made at supermarkets, clothing stores, coffee shops and many other retailers.

“When you buy an airline ticket or pay for your groceries, your credit card company has a special code for those retailers. It’s just common sense that we have the same policies in place for gun and ammunition stores,” Adams told the AP.

Gun rights advocates argue that tracking sales at gun stores would unfairly target legal gun purchases, since merchant codes just track the type of merchant where the credit or debit card is used, not the actual items purchased. A sale of a gun safe, worth thousands of dollars and an item considered part of responsible gun ownership, could be seen as a just a large purchase at a gun shop.

“The (industry’s) decision to create a firearm specific code is nothing more than a capitulation to anti-gun politicians and activists bent on eroding the rights of law-abiding Americans one transaction at a time,” said Lars Dalseide, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association.

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