SB 361 is a bill to:

prohibit discrimination against individuals, groups, associations, or businesses in matters concerning firearms, insofar as any discrimination may involve finance, lending, and credit concerning manufacture, distribution, sale, or possession of firearms, firearm ammunition, or firearms accessories.

This bill has been passed by the Senate and transmitted to the House. The hearing is scheduled for March 31, 8:00AM Room 131 at 8:00AM.

This bill, among other things, means that if you want to offer finance, lending, and credit in Montana, you can’t discriminate against firearms entities. This is a significant problem today as vendors in the firearms space have quite a bit of difficulty dealing with payment processors.

For example, Stripe’s terms of service exclude firearms and ammunition:

Square does the same thing:

The list of companies that do this is quite long. Companies like Stripe and Square would have to decide whether their anti-gun stances are worth losing all of their revenue from Montana. Hopefully, this bill will pass and other free states will use it as an example.

One weakness that should be brought to the attention of the committee is that Section 4 could be read as only applying to new applications. Whether or not this would apply to renewals is unclear. In other news, I am not a lawyer.

Unfortunately, the provisions that applied to investments by the state and insurance were taken out because state investment managers said they needed to be able to invest for maximum profit. Yes, the state investment managers consider profit to be more important than your constitutional rights.

On the bright side, the bill also provides that a plaintiff that prevails must be awarded court costs and reasonable attorney fees. Let the lawsuit printer go brrrr!