The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation on July 14 to prohibit credit card companies from assigning special codes to track lawful firearm purchases, and only five Democrats out of more than 200 voted for it.

The final tally on H.R. 1181, the Protecting Privacy in Purchases Act, was 221, 201. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia, bars payment card networks from using merchant category codes to single out gun retailers or flag legal firearm transactions. It now heads to the Senate.

The lopsided partisan split tells a clear story about where each party stands on financial surveillance of gun owners. The overwhelming Democratic opposition came despite years of mounting evidence that credit card tracking codes were designed as an end-run around Congress, a way to build what Second Amendment groups call a "backdoor gun registry" without ever passing a law.

Five Democrats broke ranks

The five Democrats who crossed party lines to support the bill were Reps. Henry Cuellar of Texas, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Don Davis of North Carolina, Jared Golden of Maine, and Adam Gray of California. All five also voted for the motion to recommit, the Daily Caller reported.

That five members felt safe enough to break ranks while the rest of the caucus held firm illustrates the Democratic Party's deepening commitment to gun-control mechanisms, even those that bypass the legislative process entirely. Breitbart reported that one Independent also joined 215 Republicans in supporting the bill.

The pattern is familiar. Democrats have shown a willingness to vote as a near-unanimous bloc against Republican priorities, whether the issue is border enforcement or the Second Amendment.

How merchant category codes became a gun-control tool

The fight over firearm-specific merchant category codes dates to September 2022, when the International Organization for Standardization approved a new MCC specifically for gun and ammunition retailers. Major payment networks, Visa, Mastercard, and Discover, moved to implement the codes under pressure from gun-control advocates during the Biden administration.

The codes would allow card companies to flag purchases at gun stores the same way they flag purchases at, say, florists or gas stations. But unlike flowers and fuel, firearms are constitutionally protected, and the data generated by these codes could be shared with government agencies or third parties.

Rep. Moore framed the issue in stark terms:

"The creation of a separate merchant category code for gun stores at the behest of the Democrat-affiliated Amalgamated Bank opens the door to creating an unconstitutional backdoor gun registry and discrimination against law-abiding gun owners."

Moore added that his bill "stops this dangerous overreach, protects consumers' financial privacy, and ensures that a backdoor federal gun registry can never be created through credit card transaction data."

A long pattern of financial pressure on gun owners

The MCC controversy did not emerge in a vacuum. It fits into a longer history of government and institutional efforts to use the financial system as a chokepoint against the firearms industry.

Under the Obama administration, the FDIC ran what became known as "Operation Chokepoint," pressuring banks to deny financial services to lawful firearms companies. The first Trump administration halted that program. But some financial institutions continued applying pressure on gun-related businesses even after the formal program ended.

In 2018, the NRA sued then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo after his administration allegedly used threats of regulatory investigations involving "reputational risk" to coerce banks and financial services companies into severing ties with the organization. The broader legal battles over Second Amendment rights continue to play out in federal courts.

Mark Oliva, managing director of public affairs at the National Shooting Sports Foundation, connected these threads in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation:

"This insidious plan to collect firearm purchase history was hatched by Amalgamated Bank and Andrew Ross Sorkin as an underhanded means to force gun control outside of legislative channels through 'woke' corporate policies. Three states, California, Colorado and New York, require Merchant Category Codes (MCCs) to be collected and monitor legal firearm and ammunition purchases. That is unconscionable."

Oliva also pointed to what he described as the Biden administration's own involvement in financial surveillance of gun buyers. He stated that former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen "dodged Congress's questions" about whether the administration was illegally collecting firearm transaction data. Days later, Oliva said, Biden's Treasury Department admitted to Sen. Tim Scott that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network had in fact surveilled Americans purchasing firearms and ammunition.

Those claims from Oliva have not been independently verified through court findings or official investigations cited in the available reporting. But they underscore the depth of distrust between the firearms community and the federal bureaucracy, distrust that H.R. 1181 was designed to address.

Industry and advocacy groups rally behind the bill

The NRA's lobbying arm called the bill a safeguard against a registry that could be "accessed by the federal government and even third parties like gun control groups." The NRA itself did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the bill's passage, nor did Gun Owners of America.

Taylor Rhodes, director of communications for the National Association for Gun Rights, offered a pointed summary before the vote:

"This bill is an important step toward stopping the financial surveillance of peaceable gun owners. The feds have no business building a financial surveillance system to track what law-abiding Americans buy, especially when those purchases involve the exercise of a constitutional right."

Rhodes added that NAGR's position was straightforward: "Buying a firearm, ammunition, or gun-related product from any business should not turn an average citizen into a target for banks, credit card companies, activist bureaucrats, or anti-gun politicians."

Oliva noted that similar protections against firearm-specific MCCs are already law in 20 states, making the federal bill a natural extension of momentum that has been building at the state level for years. The House vote to block credit card tracking of gun purchases represents a significant step toward codifying those protections nationwide.

What comes next, and what the vote reveals

H.R. 1181 now moves to the Senate, where its prospects remain unclear. But the House vote itself is revealing enough.

Two hundred and one Democrats looked at a bill that would prevent credit card companies from building a searchable database of every American who buys a firearm, and said no. They voted to preserve a system that treats the exercise of a constitutional right as a transaction worth flagging, cataloging, and potentially reporting to the government.

The bill was introduced on February 12, 2025, and its passage comes amid a broader push by House Republicans to move legislation on priorities that stalled during previous sessions. Moore called the vote a defense of "both the Second Amendment and Americans' right to privacy."

The five Democrats who broke ranks deserve credit for recognizing the obvious: that the right to buy a legal product without being tracked by your credit card company should not be a partisan question. The fact that the rest of the Democratic caucus could not bring itself to agree tells you everything about where the party's instincts lie on individual liberty.

When a party votes 201, 5 against financial privacy for gun owners, the question is not whether they support a registry. The question is why they keep pretending they don't.