Blair Gladwin, owner of the California based Gladwin Guns and Ammo, filed three class action lawsuits last week against online payment processors PayPal, Stripe, and Square for singling out him and other firearms businesses.
The payment companies required Gladwin and the other owners to reveal the nature of their dealings — after which the payment companies refused to work with them.
Gladwin claims this type of discrimination is a violation of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act Sections 51, 52(a) and 52(c), a law that protects federally-licensed gun stores from such refusals of business transactions.
The class action lawsuits, according to a press statement, are on behalf of himself and all federal firearms dealers who were barred from starting an account or had an account terminated by a payment processor because of the type of business they ran.
The lawsuits follow legislation recently introduced on Capitol Hill intended to roll back Obama era regulation known as “Operation Chokepoint” that pressured large banking institutions to terminate or refuse to do business with merchants that fell out of political favor with the Obama administration.
by Kerry Pickett