Cast Bullets | Central Plains Enterprises,llc

Banks and the Gun Industry

I am an avid reader of the website 6mmbr and take special interest in their daily bulletin blog.  It is very informative and when they do reviews I think they are honest reviews, not bought and paid for articles.  If you don’t have the site bookmarked in your favorites you should check it out.

Although I have yet to read an article of a bench rest shooter using cast bullets I know most shooters are like me and shoot many disciplines besides their favorite one.  The fact that they all reload means they are a group with great potential to sell to as only a reloader can use Central Plains Enterprises,llc’s products which are of course hard cast bullets!

Recently they posted an article that outlined a business relationship that was terminated due to the Bank taking issue with its customers business of making firearms. 

In the course of an “account analysis”, a Senior VP of Bank of America (BofA) confirmed that BofA wished to cease doing business with McMillan because the Arizona-based company now builds rifles, not just stocks and accessories.[i]

At the end of this post is a link to the article in its entirety.  I would encourage you to check it out for yourself.

If you are familiar with shooting sports you will recognize McMillan as a name with an excellent reputation for high quality rifle stocks.  I believe they also operate with high standards for customer service as well as all their business practices.  It seems if a company like McMillan can have their banking relationship terminated due to the business they are in it can potentially happen to any of us operating a business that is related to firearms.

McMillan is probably in good enough financial shape with a sound successful business they can easily change banks, but what if the same thing happened to a small business that wasn’t as successful?  What would it mean to the owners?  Would or could they be put out of business just because a Bank decided they didn’t like them?  My guess is yes it can and will happen.

As a consumer what does this mean to you?  To me it would mean analyzing who I was doing business with or planning to do business with.  You may think what would Bank of America care if they lost my account?  They are so big they wouldn’t care or even notice.  Perhaps you are correct, however what if over half of those that enjoy shooting sports would drop their accounts?  Yes, you guessed it, they would notice.  What if all companies involved in the shooting industry would refuse to accept their credit cards?  Now you are getting the picture on how I think the shooting industry need to respond to companies that choose to do business based on politics, as is stated in the article.

In the article McMillan talks about not accepting BofA issued credit cards. I don’t know if it is possible to refuse the credit cards based on who issued them.  I am going to pose the question to my card processor just so I know.  I would rather not go that route even if it is available as my customers may not have the option to change banks.  If you only had a credit card and no other account it would be easy to drop them but if you used their other banking services the option to change may not be possible.