Credit Cards

Recently we cancelled two of our credit cards.  One with First National of Omaha was tied to Best Western hotels and motels and offered points on stays at members of that chain.  It was not the card associated with the NRA.  However when First National decided to stop issuing the cards tied to the NRA, we decided to stop doing business with them.  The other was a card from Bank of America that we had had for thirty years.  We decided to cancel it when Bank of America announced it would deny credit to manufacturers of civilian firearms that leftist politicians and their allies in the media disapproved of.

I generally do not like boycotting or favoring a business because of its owners’ or executives’ political, philosophical, or religious opinions.  I prefer to make decisions on the basis of the quality and value of the goods or services offered.  However I believe these were cases where it was appropriate to make an exception.   

The behavior of the leftists in claiming all gun owners were complicit in the actions of a murderous madman and demanding that the rights of innocent people be abrogated because of the actions of that madman was not merely wrong but disgustingly and dangerously so. The attacks on the NRA and its members were despicable. The stampede by those in the traditional media was no less repellent for being completely predictable.

By their actions First National of Omaha and Bank of America joined in the attacks and ran with the stampede. I do not know if they did so cravenly under pressure (or what they thought was pressure) or cynically to try to gain favor somewhere.  It seems very unlikely the decisions were matters of principle, since the fact that criminals sometimes use guns to kill people was well known before the shooting in Florida and should not have been news to them.   

The leftists seem to want a (so far mainly metaphorical) knife fight. They are quite willing to put pressure on businesses to get things want, and they often succeed. We need to make it clear to the those  running businesses that there is a cost to caving in to the leftists and  insulting and attacking the rest of us.  It’s not a nice thing to have to do, but this is not a nice situation.