Louisiana attorney general Jeff Landry
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (AP Photo/Melinda Deslatte, File)
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By Larry Keane

Louisiana is known as the Sportsman’s Paradise for good reasons. Taxpaying outdoorsmen and women there won’t tolerate Second Amendment shenanigans, and Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry is putting a major national bank on notice.

JP Morgan Chase is the largest bank in the country with a balance sheet of nearly $3 trillion dollars. That didn’t stop Louisiana’s top attorney from sending the bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon a letter stating, “I do not believe the state of Louisiana is best served by doing business with companies that attempt to profit from the State while denying its citizens the ability to exercise their constitutional rights.”

Jamie Dimon JP Morgan JPMorgan Chase
JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon ts employees that Dimon (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

The clock’s ticking on Dimon’s response and what he’ll say his bank stands for. Turns out Louisiana isn’t interested in more games. The bond commission removed the bank from a recent meeting’s agenda and is still waiting on Dimon’s official response.”

Taking a Stand

Dimon is no stranger to congressional hearings, his bank’s policies and gun control. He was questioned in 2019 by U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) about a letter in which he described the bank’s duty to turn down business from low character clients. She wondered why JP Morgan Chase hadn’t formally adopted gun control discrimination policies like those of Bank of America and Citigroup.

“We can certainly consider that,” Dimon responded. His answer set the table and JP Morgan Chase adopted its own antigun policies.

Fast forward and Dimon testified again before the U.S. House Financial Services Committee in May this year. In his remarks, Dimon responded to a question from gun control advocate U.S. Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) that the bank, “… does not finance the manufacture of military-style weapons for civilian use.” Language gymnastics aside, Dimon dismissed the fact that Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs) are legal and so is manufacturing them. Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry took notice.

In addition to AG, Landry also sits on Louisiana’s Bond Commission which oversees and decides what banks finance the bonds and underwriting for the state’s infrastructure projects. JP Morgan certified it did not implement financing policies that would infringe on the rights of Louisianans when it submitted a “Solicitation for Offers” to the Louisiana Bond Commission. Landry made Dimon aware of the implications of these backdoor gun control policies held by the bank.

“As Attorney General, I have continuously fought to protect the rights of our citizens under the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution,” he wrote. “I believe that the Bond Commission should not conduct any business with an entity that discriminates against law-abiding citizens and businesses in the State of Louisiana.” Now JP Morgan must reconsider its “SFO” and provide answers or risk more than $1.1 billion in state business. Landry’s waiting.

States Standing Up

Louisiana isn’t alone in standing up to discriminatory policies. Texas’s legislature passed and Republican Gov. Gregg Abbott signed into law the Firearm Industry Nondiscrimination Act (FIND Act). The law prohibits “woke” corporations from profiting from Texas tax dollars and using those profits to fund efforts to deny those same taxpayers their Second Amendment rights. The law already cost JP Morgan Chase the $3.3 billion it underwrote in bonds in 2020 now that it is denied from doing so this year.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott mass shooting gun control
(Mark Rogers/Odessa American via AP)

A spokeswoman for JP Morgan Chase cried foul after the law was signed and the bank was refused the business. “While our business practices should permit us to certify, the legal risk associated with this ambiguous law prevents us from bidding on most business right now with Texas public entities.” It was JP Morgan Chase’s discriminatory business practices that got them in the situation in the first place.

State-level stands against corporate discrimination and Second Amendment activism isn’t just taking place in the South. FIND Act laws have been introduced in several states, including in Ohio where Republican state Rep. Scott Wiggam introduced legislation there.

Firearm-related businesses employ more than 12,000 Ohioans and generated $202 million in federal and state taxes. That included an additional $32.7 million in Pittman-Robertson excise taxes that benefit wildlife conservation.

“Ohio can stand up to these bank bullies. Our lawmakers already have a blueprint to do it too,” Rep. Wiggam wrote in a recent op-ed referencing Texas’s success. “Ohio has a chance to put an end to corporate entities benefitting from taxpayer-funded contracts while at the same time using that money to deny Ohioans their Second Amendment rights.”

Dimon’s response to Landry will be telling, if he sends it. More states are taking a stand for their citizens’ Second Amendment rights and telling “woke” corporations like JP Morgan Chase to take their business elsewhere.

Larry Keane is SVP for Government and Public Affairs, Assistant Secretary and General Counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

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39 COMMENTS

  1. Too bad Colorado’s AG won’t take the same stand for us. Bad enough that pole smoking Polis eliminated preemption. Waiting for these clowns to come after Douglas County.

    • Colorado has been invaded by woke Californians and they have pretty much ruined your state. It’s a shame because it’s a beautiful state, much like California was.

    • Colorado has been invaded by woke Californians and they have pretty much ruined your state. It’s a shame because it’s a beautiful state, much like California was.

  2. Good for Louisiana.

    This is a sort of lesson we should take as gun owners also. We may not be able to give up going to anti-gun business completely, but that doesn’t mean we do not have options as individuals. For example, people here have talked about a protest march against a couple of banks because of their policy’s after they turned down giving a business loan to a person who wanted to open a gun store because their policy is not to loan to things which support guns.

    A lot of people, a lot of gun owners probably more than 50 %, are not aware that places have policies that specifically discriminate against them because they exercise their constitutional right.

    Web sites are nice for helping spread awareness. But what gets more people involved is when they discover the policies of some of the specific businesses they deal with and how they can become a target of discrimination and prejudice just for exercising their constitutional right. On every level in every state and town/city rather than just talking about it on a web site and the occasional rally, stop worrying about carrying your AR-15 everywhere and stop running around screaming “second amendment”, then use some of that energy to start talking to people face to face about it and show strong public rejection of such discrimination and prejudice.

    • With slow Joe getting the lowlife secretary of the treasury on record for snooping on tiny $600 transactions my mattress is looking better n better. Only slight sarcasm intended. How many buried their gold coins when FDR came a stealing?!? Good on those states for reading Chase the riot act. They acted illegally in our mortgage some 12 years ago but it turned out ok.

      • I think the question that should be asked is can the state make it illegal for any discriminatory bank to do any business at all in the state?

      • I’ve started burying $100 bills in coffee cans throughout my property. In ten years from now when I or my sons dig them up, chances are those containers will still be worth something.

    • “a protest march against a couple of banks because of their policy’s after they turned down giving a business loan to a person who wanted to open a gun store because their policy is not to loan to things which support guns.”

      It would seem that policy is ripe for class-action status, discrimination of someone (remember, corporations are legally people) practicing an expressly-protected constitutional right.

      Where does that legal argument fall apart?

      • “gun owner”, “gun merchant”, “gun possessor”, “second amendment practitioner” are not protected classes under law. You can’t sue them for this form of “discrimination”, this is a form of business choice that is legal for a business to do that is discriminatory towards certain people but not based on a protected class discrimination reasoning.

        • It is the left that set the “protected classes” nowadays. Someone who is a man today, says he’s a woman tomorrow, then a man the day after that is protected, but violating someone’s constitutionally guaranteed freedoms is not. This world is so upside down, I’m surprised the foam on beet isn’t at the bottom of the glass.

  3. Are there any comprehensive lists of corporations that deserve to have patriots turn their backs on them? I will gladly turn my back on as many as I can.

    • here are some financial institutions that are anti-gun:

      PayPal
      Citibank/Citigroup
      Bank of America
      of course JP Morgan Chase

      But there are pro-gun financial institutions as well, for example; Wells Fargo Wells Fargo has remained resolute in its defense of the gun industry and has continued to issue multimillion-dollar lines of credit to gun companies like, for example, Sturm and Ruger & Co. Mastercard and Visa Inc. have also not caved to the anti-gun fanatics and said they will not stop customers from making lawful purchases including gun related. North Carolina-based BB&T arranged over $150 million in loans to gun companies over a four-year period.

      there is a list of anti-gun businesses at > https://www.ccrkba.org/antigunbusinesses/

      • There are other reasons to boycott Wells Fargo, their business model is to charge fees to smaller account holders, working float against them, not processing payments in timely fashion, just to be able to charge a fee.

    • It’s getting to the point that it’s probably easier to list the Fortune 1,000 companies that DON’T penalize 2A rights.

  4. Dimas doesn’t have to respond. He has already, albeit silently, taken a pass on that business, and he is not about to put his foot in his mouth (or his ass in jail) by contradicting his prior certification. I hope more states join in. The amount of business lost so far is small compared to revenues. The company made $29 billion on revenues of $123 billion in 2020.

    • Agreed. With any luck, other 2A sanctuary states like Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, etc., will follow Louisiana’s and Texas’s lead. It’s LONG past time that sanctimonious financial institutions and corporations became ‘intimately’ familiar with the phrase: “Get woke, go BROKE.

  5. After my Chase Mastercard was refused at my LGS I decided to use it only for an once a month service charge less than $4.00. It is the only thing that goes on the card, and I get a monthly statement by mail. I pay the statement online at no charge to myself. Between the cost of printing and mailing my statement, Chase is loosing money. Much better than just writing a nasty letter and closing the account.

  6. “JP Morgan Chase is the largest bank in the country with a balance sheet of nearly $3 trillion dollars.”

    I hope everyone realizes that JP Morgan Chase could care less about losing $3 billion of loans/bonds to a state since that would only represent 0.1% of their assets. Even if something like 20 states eliminated a combined $30 billion of loans/bonds from JP Morgan Chase it would not matter since that would only represent 1% of their assets–a tiny price to pay in exchange for some serious virtue signaling.

    And we have not even considered to what extent Blue states would reward JP Morgan Chase with additional loans/bonds, thus offsetting their losses in assets from Red states.

    Yea for virtue signaling!

    • “I hope everyone realizes that JP Morgan Chase could care less about losing $3 billion of loans/bonds to a state since that would only represent 0.1% of their assets. Even if something like 20 states eliminated a combined $30 billion of loans/bonds from JP Morgan Chase it would not matter since that would only represent 1% of their assets–a tiny price to pay in exchange for some serious virtue signaling.”

      In what kind of math does 3 billion and 30 billion both represent 1% of the total of a thing (JP Morgan Chase assets in this case) ?

      🙂

  7. Just so people know for the sake of filling in the blanks, and not trying to defend them; JP Morgan Chase does do business with gun manufacturers and businesses, many of them.

    According to their financial policy and procedures, and according to Dimon statements to congress in a previous hearing; JP Morgan Chase conducts a thorough review of retailers selling firearms and finding that the ATF audits them and they are regulated by the state and federal government, they will do business with them. But if they think they are doing something wrong the risk committee stops doing business with them. The clients JP Morgan Chase will not do business with are those they describe as having “low character” which means for them those businesses that are lax in, or missing, the responsibility or business attributes JP Morgan Chase wants them to have.

  8. Invest in what holds value, gold, silver and other commodities! The world runs on them. Don’t patronize these treasonous bastards! Buy American pay a bit more for home made goods your neighborhood depends on it. The money stays here.

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