Dick’s Throws in the Towel: Pulling Guns from 125 Stores

Dick’s Sporting Goods announced Tuesday it will pull guns from 125 stores around the country.

The Wall Street Journal reports that these are 125 of 729 “namesake locations” for Dick’s. The decision to pull guns comes after the sporting goods chain tested the gun-less store approach last year in ten stores in 2018.

The Journal notes that Dick’s sales have been in decline “despite a strong U.S. economy and consumer spending.” Dick’s CEO Ed Stack admits that the decline is due to the chain’s stance on guns. That stance, which includes a refusal to sell wildly popular semiautomatic rifles and 30-round magazines, has brought about a reality in which “some gun enthusiasts have stopped shopping at the chain.”

Dick’s began a corporate gun control push in earnest two weeks after the February 14, 2018, Parkland High School shooting. On February 28, 2018, Breitbart News reported that the chain would no longer sell AR-15s or “high capacity” magazines, and that it would refuse all long sales — whether rifle or shotgun — to 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds.

By late August 2018, Dick’s admitted that its corporate gun control stance was hurting its overall sales, yet the company stood its ground. So Dick’s sales decreased at a time when “the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index was the highest its been in about 18 years,” according to the Journal.

The chain maintained its corporate gun control position and tried to stall the sales slide by removing “hunting products” in certain stores in order to make room for athletic products, which it believed would sell better.

Now the chain will remove all firearms from 125 stores in hopes of creating shelf space for products that will bring people back to Dick’s.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.