On March 9, the major U.S. credit card companies, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, announced that they were not going ahead with implementing a new code that identifies purchases from gun stores as different from purchases from big-box or other outdoor stores. The code, approved in September 2022 by the International Organization of Standardization (ISO), which regulates the international protocols by which credit companies abide, has been the subject of intense criticism from Republican lawmakers. The new classification was first proposed in 2021 by Amalgamated Bank, a 100-year-old U.S.