Dick’s Sporting Goods Isn’t Doing So Hot, and Their CEO Isn’t Helping

Not long ago, Dick’s Sporting Goods decided to jump on the virtue signal bandwagon and announce that it would no longer be selling AR-15’s out of its stores.

It was soon discovered how much of a virtue signal the move was, as America discovered that Dick’s only sells the guns out of their “Field and Stream” locations, and there are only a handful of those across the U.S. The sale of AR-15’s hardly made a blip on the radar in terms of profit.

So Dick’s was making no great sacrifice, and the gesture seemed even more hollow than before. The public backlash was pretty immediate, with one gun seller writing a statement that made the CEO Edward Stack look like the ignorant clown he was.

The entire episode hurt Dick’s, not just in reputation, but in the bank account too.

Stack told CNN that he knew the move would cause customers to close their wallets to the store for good.

“There’s going to be some push-back and we expected that. There are going to be the people who don’t shop us anymore for anything,” he told CNN, and later added that the move was “not going to be positive from a traffic standpoint and a sales standpoint.”

He was correct, but I’m not sure he anticipated how correct he would be, and now Dick’s is suffering “deeper than expected” losses according to Forbes.

Shares of Dick’s fell as much as 7.3 percent to $30.19 in New York, the biggest intraday decline since mid-November. They had climbed 13 percent this year through Monday’s close.

Instead of attempting to at least plug some of the leaks on the good ship Dick’s, the CEO has decided to double down on his stances and pen an op-ed for the Washington Post wherein he attempts to paint the nation as having a gun problem, a fruitless congress:

As a gun owner, I support the Second Amendment and understand why, for many, the right to bear arms is as American as baseball and apple pie. But I also agree with what Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his majority opinion in 2008’s landmark Heller case: ‘Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.’ It is ‘not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.’

It is clear we have a problem with the gun laws in this country. They are not squarely focused on keeping all of us safe — especially our children. There continue to be mass shootings — at our schools, churches and entertainment venues. Following each of these senseless, tragic events there’s a great deal of idle, fruitless talk in the halls of Congress, and then the conversation quickly comes to an end.

First off, America has no gun problem. Not only are these mass shootings rarer than the media likes to make them out to be, they’re on the decline. Secondly, we have all the laws in place we can reasonably have to prevent mass shootings from occurring. The problems that led to the Parkland shooting can be placed, not on the NRA, the gun, or right-leaning politicians, but on the law enforcement agencies who did not do their jobs.

As has been repeated ad nauseam, the Broward County Sheriff’s Dept., as well as the FBI, had this kid on their radar for ages with all sorts of reasons to deem him mentally unfit to hold so much as a blade of grass. Yet they sat on their hands, and continued to sit on them just outside the school as the shooter took 17 innocent lives.

I don’t see Stack mention any of this, but he does push for people on the no-fly list — a list proven to be wholly inaccurate and likely unconstitutional — should also not be allowed to have guns. He’s also patted the heads of the “kids in Florida” taking a stand against this gun problem, just in case you were curious as to where he stood on the upcoming March for Our Lives.

It remains to be seen how badly Stack’s attitudes toward America’s gun rights affect the sales of his sporting goods store, but I for one won’t be caught dead there.

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