CBS News ran a story on their CBS Sunday Morning program titled, “Corporations and guns: How companies are reshaping the gun control debate.” It should have been titled, “Get woke, go broke.”
After all, Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO Ed Stack admits his company’s unilateral anti-gun positions have cost his company dearly. Stack admits to destroying $5 million worth of America’s favorite rifles, the AR-15 and others like it, “to keep them off the street.”
Not only that, but policies like discriminating against under 21s for gun and ammo sales have cost the company right about $250 million.
He apparently relishes the decisions which have reportedly cost his company a quarter billion dollars.
From CBS News:
As Dick’s grew, it became one of the biggest sellers of firearms. Until, that is, 2012, when a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
Dick’s became one of the biggest sellers of firearms? Now that’s a whopper.
“All we were going to do was just take it off the shelf and not say anything,” said Stack.
The “it” he’s talking about is the AR-15, a lightweight semi-automatic modern sporting rifle similar to the one used in the Sandy Hook massacre. He ordered all of them be removed from every Dick’s Sporting Goods store across the country.
“We probably get a little bit of a backlash, but we didn’t expect to get what we got,” he said. “All this about, you know, how we were anti-Second Amendment, you know, ‘we don’t believe in the Constitution,’ and none of that could be further from the truth. We just didn’t want to sell the assault-style weapons that could inflict that kind of damage.”
Of course, we all know that Dicks resumed selling modern sporting rifles eventually. But they pulled them down again after the Parkland, Florida school massacre when they found out that the Parkland killer bought a shotgun at a Dick’s store.
“We found out that we sold this kid a shotgun,” Stack said. “That’s when I said, ‘We’re done.'”
That “kid” was an adult at the time.
The experience moved Stack’s stand again guns one step further. He announced he would no longer sell any firearm to anyone under the age of 21 – a move many inside the company warned would surely drive off sales. And it did.
Cowan asked, “How much did you think you were going to lose?”
“A quarter of a billion dollars,” Stack replied.
“And how much did you actually lose?”
“About a quarter of a billion! Pretty close.”
On top of that, the assault-style rifles he still had in stock – about $5 million worth of inventory – he turned into scrap metal.
“I said, ‘You know what? If we really think these things should be off the street, we need to destroy them,'” he said.
It looks like his decision has led to continued bleeding from Dick’s. After all, at their stockholder’s meeting back in March, Stack claimed his company had only lost $150 million. Only $150 million.
Now, that figure has risen to $250 million.
But originally, The Hill reported that Dick’s stock price has risen “after new gun rules don’t affect sales.”
Our anecdotal experiences look different. Given the empty stores we’ve found the handful of times we’ve stopped by to see how Dick’s and their Field & Stream stores were doing.
Stack’s company has also suffered additional “challenges,” including a number of high-profile gun makers like Springfield Armory, Mossberg, Inland, and Hi-Point refusing to sell their products to Dick’s. Not only that, but the National Shooting Sports Foundation industry group kicked Dick’s to the curb as well.
Of course, Stack closes with the world-famous “if it saves just one life…” tripe to CBS News:
“So many people say to me, you know, ‘If we do what you want to do, it’s not going to stop these mass shootings,'” said Stack. “And my response is, ‘You’re probably right, it won’t. But if we do these things and it saves one life, don’t you think it’s worth it?'”
As if the lives Stephen Williford saved in a small-town in Texas with an AR-15 are somehow worth less.