Bitcoin is so unsafe that you cannot buy it with a credit card issued by; Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America or American Express.
Don’t worry though, if you (G## forbid) feel the need, you most certainly may use that credit card to buy military-grade assault rifles and ammo.
Tragically, that’s exactly what Omar Mateen did. In June 2016, days before killing 49 and wounding 53 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, he opened six new credit card accounts and bought more than $26K worth of guns, assault rifles and ammo.
The police shot and killed him on the spot, so it’s a good guess he probably never got to pay off that bloody credit card bill.
Most of America’s biggest banks claim the risk of fraud, losses and volatility in the cryptocurrency market is just too great and they have therefore banned cryptocurrency purchases with their cards.
According to a 2018 New York Times investigation, credit cards were used to finance weapons and ammunition is eight of the 13 mass shootings that killed more than 10 people between 2007 and 2018.
While PayPal, Apple Ipay and Square have banned the sale of “weapons and other devices designed to cause physical injury,” Visa’s CEO said he couldn’t possibly do the same. His job is to “facilitate fair and secure commerce.” Secure commerce for mass killers, uh-huh. Not so much for those dangerous and deranged enough to consider cryptocurrency.
How many people have died because of Bitcoin? According to an online search, zero.
After the Sandy Hook School massacre of 20 children and six adults in 2012 and again after 17 were killed and 17 maimed at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL in 2018, there have been major efforts to renew federal legislation outlawing the non-military sale of semiautomatic weapons.* To no avail.
We’re a bit jaded when it comes to blanket approaches to “ethical” investing and see more marketing hype than substance to most ESG blather. Yet on this topic, we are unequivocal.
As Andrew Ross Sorkin said in his NYT article “the financial industry is uniquely positioned to see, if it chose to do so, a potential killer’s behavior in a way that retailers, law enforcement officials, concerned family members or mental health professionals cannot.”
Please let’s reach out to our credit card companies now. If they have the gumption to ban innocuous Bitcoin there's zero excuses why they can't help prevent the devastating loss of life caused by mass killing.
Together, let's get serious and do everything we can to ban assault rifles once and for all.
*19 assault weapons, including Colt’s AR-15, were banned in the US from 1994 to 2014. In that decade, “gun massacres of six or more killed decreased by 37 percent, then shot up 183 percent during the decade following its expiration.”
