Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO Ed Stack admitted over the weekend that his push to remove guns from circulation led him to turn $5 million in his own inventory to scrap metal.
Dick’s Sporting Goods has destroyed $5 million of the chain’s gun inventory, CEO Edward Stack says https://t.co/gORkHh8G7w
— CNN (@CNN) October 8, 2019
Stack explained during a Sunday interview on CBS that once he made the decision to pull firearms from his own shelves, he realized that he didn’t feel right about them being in circulation at all. “I said, ‘You know what? If we really think these things should be off the street, we need to destroy them,'” he explained.
Stack made his first corporate move away from firearm sales in 2012, after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut — he made the decision to stop selling the AR-15. (RELATED: Dick’s Sporting Goods Lost Millions Over Anti-Gun Policies – Here’s How Much The Backlash Cost)
“All we were going to do was just take it off the shelf and not say anything,” adding that the backlash was a bit harsher than he had initially expected. “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.”
Stack took things a step further following the the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Florida, when he instituted a corporate policy not to sell firearms to anyone under the age of 21.
“We found out that we sold this kid a shotgun,” Stack explained, referencing admitted Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz. “That’s when I said, ‘We’re done.’ Even though it wasn’t the gun he used. It could have been.”
Stack admitted that the policy changes coupled with his decision to scrap his remaining inventory led to an overall loss of a quarter of a billion dollars — but that hasn’t stopped him from considering a permanent ban on all firearm sales in all of his stores. “The whole category is under strategic review,” he said.