Leftists are desperate to ban assault weapons, that category of weapons which has no objective definition that doesn’t boil down to “it looks scary to lazy journalists.” New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin has cobbled together a gun control proposal that not only displays his ignorance about firearms but also about the free market and America in general.

Sorkin’s idea is that the big banks can implement de facto gun control or assault weapons bans by refusing to do business with dealers who sell so-called assault weapons.

How Banks Could Control Gun Sales if Washington Won’t

Remember when the left hated the big banks and trusted Washington to handle every detail of their lives? Times have changed I guess.

For the past year, chief executives have often talked about the new sense of moral responsibility that corporations have to help their communities and confront social challenges even when Washington won’t.

In the aftermath of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 students and staff members — and at a time when Washington shows little interest in limiting the sales of assault weapons — there’s a real opportunity for the business community to fill the void and prove that all that talk about moral responsibility isn’t hollow.

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?

In a country that now won’t allow a family owned bakery to set rules on what events they choose to cater but let’s make the “banksters” the guardians of America’s moral compass. What would Occupy Wall Street think?

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.)

That bump stock thing has already been handled, by Washington no less.

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.

Some stores would be forced to eliminate “assault weapons” from their stores. Others would switch to a cash only business or work to set up financing of their own. Mastercard and Visa would suffer a loss of revenue from the stores who respond to the new credit card rules with an invitation for Mastercard and Visa to sexually penetrate themselves. They would suffer more losses in the inevitable public relations disaster that would follow. They would also be creating a market for new credit card companies who cater to Americans who believe in the 2nd amendment rather than New York nanny-staters.

Leftist proposals very often neglect to acknowledge that you can’t change one variable and expect the entire system to remain in its current state of equilibrium. Apart from the changes that would result in the credit card market, there would be changes in the gun industry. As I stated above, there is no objective definition of “assault weapon.” It’s a term used to scare people and usually only refers to purely cosmetic aspects of a weapon. The credit card companies would have to create a contractual definition for what an assault weapon is and the gun manufacturers could simply alter their product so they no longer meet that definition.

Sorkin admits the idea is not without flaws.

The most troubling aspect of having the finance industry try to restrict gun sales is that it would push the most dangerous guns into an untraceable world where sales would depend on cash. That’s true.

“Most dangerous” in this case probably means “most often used by dangerous people.” At best the restrictions would only lead to the dangerous people choosing different means to commit mayhem. (Also, people currently make entirely traceable cash purchases of guns because most gun dealers obey the law.)

All things considered, though, it would make it considerably harder to even find such guns.

No, it wouldn’t. It would only make acquiring them more inconvenient for law abiding citizens which is the fatal flaw in almost any gun control scheme concocted by the left.