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A bill to enlist banks in the fight against gun crime

A day after two students were killed at a school in Santa Clarita, Calif., Representative Jennifer Wexton, Democrat of Virginia, is planning to introduce a bill in Congress this morning that would require banks and other financial institutions to work with the government to help identify and report suspicious or illegal financial activity related to firearms.

The bill was inspired, in part, by Andrew Ross Sorkin’s columns on the role that banks could play to help end gun violence.

“Banks, credit card companies, and retailers have unique insight into the behavior and purchasing patterns that can help identify and prevent mass shootings,” Ms. Wexton said in a statement. “We know that financial intelligence can be an effective tool to combat gun violence in the same way it is for money laundering, human smuggling, and fentanyl trafficking.”

Here’s how it would work: The bill, called the Gun Violence Prevention Through Financial Intelligence Act, would require the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, to work with financial companies to develop a framework to identify suspicious firearms transactions. The bill says that if FinCEN determines that banks do not have enough data to identify suspicious activity, it “must submit a report to Congress detailing the process and identifying barriers to data collection.”