President Donald Trump recently called out American banks for their track record of discriminating against lawful American businesses, including numerous firms in the firearms and ammunition industry.
Larry Keane, senior vice president for government and public affairs and general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation based in Newtown, Connecticut, said, “While speaking at the World Economic Forum 2025 in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump didn’t mince words.”
Keane pointed to President Trump’s words to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan: “You and Jamie [JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon] and everybody else, I hope you start opening your banks to conservatives. What you’re doing is wrong.” Keane said that Trump’s words were particularly true for gunmakers.
Keane said, “Dimon in 2021 testified at a Congressional hearing and stated under oath that JP Morgan Chase would not lend to manufacturers of Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs). ‘We do not finance the manufacture of military style weapons for civilian use,’ Dimon said at the time.”
President Trump using such a critical time and place to highlight corporate America’s — and specifically the banking industry’s — against lawful businesses isn’t new, Keane said.
The firearms industry has had to fight against discrimination for years, Keane said, including directly from Bank of America when in 2018, the bank announced they would end financial relationships with manufacturers of Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs), which they erroneously called “military-style rifles.” MSRs are semiautomatic centerfire rifles that utilize the same one-trigger-pull-one-round-fired technology used in handguns and shotguns.
But even before 2018 and BofA’s public pronouncements, Keane said, the Obama administration conducted the illegal Operation Choke Point scheme launched by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Department of Justice (DOJ). “Those agencies tried to stop financial institutions from offering banking services to companies in politically disfavored industries,” Keane pointed out.
“Whether it’s by government regulator or a bank’s own policy, discrimination against a lawful, highly regulated industry – that’s protected by the Constitution – should not be tolerated and President Trump is telling them to get in line,” Keane said.
It’s why the industry wholeheartedly supports several federal legislative policies to prohibit such bad behavior, Keane said. He added, “That includes the Fair Access to Banking Act, introduced in the U.S. Senate last year by Sen. Kevin Cramer and in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Andy Barr. Both bills are expected to once again by introduced in the new Congressional session imminently.”
Keane also noted that the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance is slated to hold a high-profile hearing on Wednesday, Feb. 5, to cover access to banking services by firearms firms and other businesses.
