Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO Says His Anti-Gun Crusade Has Cost the Company a Quarter Billion Dollars

After the Parkland shooting, Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO Ed Stack made a very big show of being a pro-gun control advocate by announcing that he refused to sell any more AR-15’s from his stores. He even began launching campaigns to promote AR-15 bans.

Sure enough, the move cost him dearly.

While appearing on CBS Sunday Morning, Stack mentioned just how much the company had lost thanks to Stack’s virtue signal.

“About a quarter of a billion,” Stack replied. “Pretty close.”

Stack said that he had anticipated losing that much money, including the $5 million worth of AR-15’s he destroyed within his company’s inventory.

“I said, ‘You know what? If we really think these things should be off the street, we need to destroy them,’” he told CBS about the move.

According to Stephen Gutowski at the Washington Free Beacon, Stack’s expectations that he would lose a lot of money thanks to the company’s stance under his leadership was something he had factored in:

That is consistent with Stack’s previous statements on the losses associated with his decision. In the company’s 2018 annual report, he wrote that gun sales were a “sizeable part” of Dick’s business and that his push for the company to support new gun control laws significantly hurt that business. However, this did not make him reconsider his decision to use company resources to lobby for gun control and to remove certain guns from stores.

“The hunting category is a sizeable part of our business; however, there has been an overall slowdown in sales in this category since the announcement of our new firearms policy,” the annual report read. “Despite this, we continue to believe that implementing this new policy is the right decision for our athletes and our communities. In fact, if we could go back and revisit it, we would still make the same choice today.”

While gun sales have been down overall, they’re recently beginning to shoot back up thanks to Democrats targeting guns, such as Robert “Beto” O’Rourke’s “hell yes we’re going to take your AR-15” comment. This is likely going to cause a bigger dent in the company’s bottom line.

Stack has indicated that he’s thinking about pulling the company away from any gun sales whatsoever. How this will affect the company remains to be seen, but it’s likely that it won’t end well.

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