Dick’s Sporting Goods Lost $250M From Anti-Gun Stance, According To CEO

Here's clips from CEO Edward Stack's interview with CBS for you to see yourself:

What do you think of Dick's anti-gun decisions?

A little drastic?

Are you surprised they've lost millions from customers?

Here's more from the Dick's CEO from CBS:

Overseeing more than 720 stores in 47 states, Ed Stack, the CEO of Dick's Sporting Goods, has a multi-billion-dollar empire to run. But Stack is now balancing running a business with his new role as one of the corporate faces of America's gun control debate.

"I don't understand how somebody, with everything that's gone on, could actually sit there and say, 'I don't think we need to do a background check on people who buy guns.' It's just, it's ridiculous," he said. 

It's a pretty controversial stand from a company that's been in the gun business a long, long time. His father, Richard Stack, started Dick's Bait and Tackle in Binghamton, New York in 1948. He used a $300 loan from his grandmother's cookie jar to do it. He was just 18. These days he'd probably hardly recognize the place – it's grown from that one tiny location into a nationwide chain, with some stores that are big enough to house the Space Shuttle.

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.

"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."

What Dick's did, didn't stop mass shootings; they were uncomfortably numerous after Sandy Hook. But when a shooting happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in 2018, it hit closer to Stack than it ever had.

"We found out that we sold this kid a shotgun," Stack said. "That's when I said, 'We're done.'"

"Even though that wasn't the gun he used?" asked Cowan. 

"Even though it wasn't the gun he used. It could have been."

Ever since Parkland, he and his wife, Donna, have been weighing the moral implications of continuing to sell firearms at all. They even took a trip to Florida to meet with Parkland survivors.

Donna recalled, "You're speechless for a second, because you can't even imagine the pain and the suffering that they're going through. You like just walk in, and I just wanted to hug all of them. It was hard."

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. 

Dianna Muller served in the Tulsa Police Department for 22 years, and is now an award-winning professional shooter. When "Sunday Morning" caught up with her she was competing at the Rock Castle Shooting Center in Park City, Kentucky. It was  ladies only, a shooting league called A Girl and a Gun. 

Of the move by Dick's Sporting Goods she said, "If they don't want guns, that's their right. It feels really anti-American to start creating public policy through corporate policy."

The New York Times also said:

Edward W. Stack, the chief executive of Dick’s Sporting Goods, said in an interview this week that his company had destroyed over $5 million in military-style, semiautomatic rifles and was reviewing whether it would continue to sell guns in its more than 720 stores.

Mr. Stack was speaking with “CBS Sunday Morning” while promoting his new book, “It’s How We Play the Game.”

“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,’” Mr. Stack told CBS. “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?’”

Mr. Stack said that he and his wife, Donna, have been weighing the moral consequences of selling firearms patterned on the AR-15 and other military-style weapons since the February 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The couple had learned that the gunman had bought a gun in a Dick’s store. Although that firearm was not used in the Parkland shooting, which left 17 dead, Mr. Stack and his wife met with survivors in Florida.

In April 2018, Dick’s Sporting Goods, one of the largest firearms sellers in the United States, said it planned to destroy the military-style rifles it had agreed to take off its shelves weeks after the shooting. “I said: ‘You know what? If we really think these things should be off the street, we need to destroy them,’” Mr. Stack said. 

In an interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Stack criticized Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, for dragging his feet on gun control legislation.

Previously, the Pennsylvania retailer had also agreed to ban the sale of military-style rifles at its 35 Field & Stream stores, and to stop selling firearms and ammunition to anyone younger than 21.