Credit cards have become a crucial part of the planning of mass shootings, with eight of the 13 perpetrators of the worst massacres in the past decade in the United States financing their attacks using credit cards and buying firearms they could not otherwise have afforded, a study by The New York Times revealed on Monday.
The national debate following mass shootings has usually focused on regulating firearms, but scant attention has been paid to the financial industry that has become an unwitting enabler of such massacres, the paper argued.
The official investigations following each mass shooting uncovered large amounts of information about the killers’ spending, with plenty of red flags, if only someone was looking for them, law enforcement experts said.
The Times gave one such glaring example in that eight months before Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 more at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, he began opening six new credit card accounts. Just 12 days before the shooting, he started a buying spree of more than $20,000 on weapons and ammunition.
Two days before the massacre, he went on Google and typed “Credit card unusual spending.” His web browsing history showed his concern: “Credit card reports all three bureaus,” “FBI,” and “Why banks stop your purchases.”
But none of the banks, credit-card network operators or payment processors informed police about the purchases that Mateen thought were suspicious. Law enforcement officials insist the financial industry is uniquely positioned to notice a potentital killer's behavior.
Financial firms have so far resisted changing the way they deal with the sale of guns, with banks and credit-card networks saying it is not their responsibility to create systems to track such purchases that would allow them to report suspicious patterns.
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