What a really futile and stupid gesture on the part of Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO Ed Stack.
In a wide-ranging interview with CBS News — just kidding; the whole talk was nothing more than “guns bad” — Stack revealed that his company reduced $5 million worth of AR-15s and similar semiautomatic sporting rifles into “scrap metal.”
Following the Sandy Hook massacre, Stack (in)famously removed all the mean-looking rifles from his store’s shelves, and then promptly had them destroyed.
Stack explained, “I said, ‘You know what? If we really think these things should be off the street, we need to destroy them.'” And then he did.
After the Parkland massacre, the company then restricted all firearms purchases to people 21 and over (the legal limit is 18), costing the company — and its shareholders — “About a quarter of a billion!” just as Stack had estimated. Fruitlessly, I might add:
“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.”
Put this guy in charge of a lemonade stand, and you’ll end up with a couple of homeless little girls.
The CBS News piece included a very brief segment with professional target shooter and Second Amendment advocate Dianna Muller — just enough to claim “balance” — before shifting right back to Guns Bad with former New York mayor and full-time gun grabber, Mike Bloomberg. He said, “You know, a crisis is too important to waste. And maybe during this time, they will do some things that they would have never have done before just because they want to divert attention.” The “crisis” Bloomberg refers to must be America’s longterm decline in gun violence, I guess, which began a quarter of a century ago.
Some crisis, eh?
Now, I don’t want to tell Dick’s that they have to sell firearms, any more than I think I can order Bloomberg to conceal-carry a nice little .380 auto for his personal protection (although I’d wager his security detail carries quite a bit more than that). It isn’t my business to tell people they must sell this or that, or that they must take full advantage of their constitutional rights. But the whole point of the Bill of Rights is that some matters are considered too important to be left up to governmental whims, or even to the fleeting passions of the people, ourselves.
Dick’s is even free, at shareholder expense, to destroy millions of dollars worth of existing inventory. To which I say: Scrap all you like — we’ll make more.
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