GE curbs financing firearm retailers

GE Capital, General Electric's lending arm, recently pulled the plug on consumer financing programmes to retailers whose main business was selling guns.

According to the company the move came in response to the ''industry changes, new legislation and tragic events.''

A GE Capital spokesman said the move came as an expansion on a policy established in 2008, the year, the company stopped offering new consumer financing for gun purchases from gun shops. However existing relationships with gun shops were continued.

According to spokesman Russell Wilkerson, the recent policy change had affected less than 75 retailers, a fraction of 1 per cent of gun retailers in the US. He added, the terminated financing programmes, as a business, were ''immaterial'' to the company.

According to Wilkerson the lending cutoff applied to only those retailers whose primary business was selling guns. GE Capital was still offering financing to other retailers who sold many different kinds of merchandise, including guns. These retailers ranged from Walmart to sporting goods chains.

The change in GE Capital's lending policy to the gun stores was first reported on Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal.

The GE move follows the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. General Electric, the giant industrial and finance company, is headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut (See: US mulls gun control as youth shoots down 26 at school). A number of employees of the company were students of Sandy Hook elementary school, where the tragedy occurred. The Sandy Hook gunman Adam Lanza, was the son of Peter Lanza, an executive at General Electric.

General Electric Co's Connecticut headquarters is about 35 minutes by car from the site of the Newtown school massacre.

According to Mike Stulce, owner of a Texas gun shop, GE was the last lender to stop financing firearm sales.  Earlier there were two other lenders that dropped service and the most recent exit came about five years ago, he said.

According to analysts, the pullback came as a symbolic step in a country that had over 300 million firearms.

Additionally, GE said it had suspended Visa and MasterCard processing and notified clients it would have a FedEx Corp agent pick up their point-of-sale terminals.

Stulce whose Champion Firearms shop in College Station employs 15 people said GE did not specify but he would guess and say it had something to do with the politics at the moment.