After Dick’s Sporting Goods adopted the decision to no longer sell certain types of semi-automatic firearms, the company determined it had destroyed $5 million in inventory to fulfill their gun-control policy.
Get the most beautiful D-Day 75th Anniversary Commemorative Coin on the market, here
Dick’s Sporting Goods adopted new policies to ban the sale of any “assault style” firearms at any of its stores within weeks of a 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla. where 17 people were killed. Rather than sell off their remaining inventory Dick’s Sporting Goods instead turned all the guns to scrap, CEO Ed Stack told CBS News during an interview Sunday.
Stack also told CBS his company lost “a quarter billion dollars” in sales. On top of those losses, the store destroyed an additional $5 million in inventoried firearms.
“I said, ‘You know what? If we really think these things should be off the street, we need to destroy them,'” Stack said.
It was not clear how much the company additionally paid to destroy those specified firearms.
CBS went on to interview Dianna Muller, a 22-year Tulsa Police Department veteran and gun rights advocate, Muller said, “If they don’t want guns, that’s their right. It feels really anti-American to start creating public policy through corporate policy.”
Muller supported the civilian use and ownership of AR-15s like those now banned by Dick’s Sporting Goods.
“This rifle, and any other rifle, kills fewer people than hammers and blunt objects every year, according to FBI statistics,” Muller said.
In 2012, Dick’s Sporting Goods had adopted a previous ban on “assault style” rifles after a school shooting in Connecticut, but Stack said he was affected again by the Parkland shooting. After learning that Dick’s Sporting Goods had sold the suspect a shotgun, Stack said: “We’re done.”
“Even though it wasn’t the gun he used, it could have been,” Stack told CBS.
Despite the prior sales ban at Dick’s Sporting Goods stores, its new firearms policies called for the same “assault style” firearms to be removed from its subsidiary Field and Stream stores. The 2018 policies also banned the sale of high capacity magazines and called for universal background checks and a purchase database for all firearms sales. Additionally, the policies raised the minimum age of firearms sales to 21, barring those between the ages of 18 and 21 from making firearms purchases despite having a legal right to make such purchases.
In March 2019, the retailer went further on to discontinue the sale of firearms at 125 stores where hunting sections were underperforming.
Other companies, such as Walmart, have also adopted in-store gun-control measures.
In the wake of shooting events in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, 145 companies also signed on to a letter calling for “red flag” laws that would allow police agencies to confiscate guns from those who have not committed any crimes but may appear to be at risk of harming themselves or others.
