It's How We Play the Game

by Ed Stack

  So it had become our habit, in the first hours after a mass shooting, to conduct a search through the files, to pin down whether we’d been dragged into a story that we wanted no part of. And if we had, to decide how we would respond to it.

  So far, we’d never had to.

  One detail emerged early: the shooter had used an “assault-style” rifle, meaning some variant of the AR-15, a civilian cousin of the US military’s M16 rifle. Compact, light, and accurate, the AR-15 fires a 5.56-millimeter round—essentially an elongated and more powerful version of a .223-caliber bullet. It rips to pieces whatever it hits.

  Within the gun industry, these weapons are called “modern sporting rifles,” a term coined by a trade group three years before Sandy Hook in an unsuccessful attempt to get people to stop using the “assault-style” label. Fueling my unease that afternoon was the fact that we stocked MSRs at Dick’s. We hadn’t been carrying them for long, but we’d added them to the inventory over the previous year or so because they were popular—they’re among the biggest sellers at gun retailers around the country—not because we saw any particular merit to them. We were simply answering a demand. As we waited for a name, I wondered about the wisdom of that decision.

  When it came, we found that the gunman hadn’t purchased his assault-style rifle at Dick’s. But not long after, somebody called the media and reported that they thought they saw the shooter in one of our stores a couple of days before the massacre. The police asked to review our security camera footage, and we cooperated fully.

  Even though they knew this guy hadn’t bought from us, some media outlets demanded to see the video, too. They got really aggressive with us, even airing stories saying that this nut had been seen in a Dick’s store. We weren’t about to share the tape with them. I’m not sure we could have, even if we’d wanted to—we were cooperating in a mass-murder investigation, for God’s sake. But some TV people didn’t give a shit about confirming their information and went with stories we were sure were bogus. Then CNN and some of the other big outfits started calling, wanting to know what was going on.

  Our management team huddled on the phone, late into the night, trying to figure out what to do. We emerged from that long conversation with two decisions. One, the media could pound salt. We weren’t going to be handing over our tapes. We’d stress to anyone who asked that we hadn’t sold this nut a gun and leave it at that.

  The second decision inspired a lot more debate. We went back and forth over whether MSRs had ever been a comfortable fit at Dick’s. They weren’t traditional hunting rifles, which served our primary clientele. In demand or not, they were out of step with our mission as a company—it was a stretch to consider them at all “sporting.” As long as we sold them, we’d be giving them an implicit Dick’s seal of approval. And as we were among the biggest gun retailers in America, that made us part of the problem they caused. The fact that we hadn’t sold a rifle to the shooter was beside the point.

  Every so often comes a moment when you have to stop thinking of your company solely as an engine for making money and broaden your view to consider its role in American life. It seems to me that all of us, not just doctors, should strive to hold true to the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm. I don’t see why that shouldn’t go for companies, too. Earning a return for the shareholder is important—without that, a business can’t do much else, good or otherwise—but a company’s income should be a reward for not only worthy products and good business strategy but responsible behavior. Put simply, to be a good company, you have to do good.

  That may seem a surprising platitude from a guy who just a little ways back was talking about how much he loves a street fight, but there’s a difference between a metaphorical pep talk and real life.

  Anyway: we hashed out what to do about the weapons in that marathon late-night conference call. Four of us went around and around for close to three hours about it—besides me, David Mosse, our general counsel, was in on the call, along with Joe Schmidt, our president, and Lauren Hobart, who was running our marketing. We struggled to find the overlap between what was in the best interest of the company and what was the right thing to do.

  The decision came down to this: On the one hand, we made some money from selling assault-style rifles, and we followed the letter and spirit of the law in doing so. We were within our rights to keep doing business as usual. On the other hand, twenty-seven people, including twenty little children, had been murdered with a weapon uniquely suited to mass killing. It wasn’t the first time an AR-15 had been used that way, and it seemed a safe bet it wouldn’t be the last.

  By the end of the call, it looked like a no-brainer.

  We had to stop selling the damn things.

  * * *

  Our decision to suspend the sale of assault-style weapons wasn’t the first time Dick’s had been moved by a sense of civic duty to do such a thing. I’d yanked all firearms and ammo after September 11, you’ll recall, but there was an even earlier precedent: thirteen years before that, we’d done something similar after a burglary at our first Rochester store. The thieves stole ten handguns and eleven shotguns and rifles.

  At the time—October 1988—we had just a few stores and hadn’t yet developed the sophisticated security systems we have in place today. The crooks weren’t subtle. They used a sledgehammer to smash the front door, cleaned out the gun display cases, and dashed back out. We talked about how to respond. One idea was to build a cage around that whole part of the store so we could lock it down at night. We talked about taking the guns out of the cases at closing time and discussed where we could keep them safe. But we worried that if we did either, thieves bent on getting guns might show up while we were open, and somebody would get hurt.

  We were wrestling with this question, two or three days after the break-in, when the police called and said they’d found some of the guns. They were in a house in a rough part of Rochester, in which they’d also found a bunch of teenage gangbangers. The city’s SWAT team had launched a massive raid on the house after word on the street said the kids had stolen the guns with every intention of using them, and soon, against rival gangs, the police themselves, or both. We were staggered. I talked it over with Bill Colombo, who was our head of stores at the time, and we decided we were done with handguns. If we couldn’t safeguard the inventory, we figured that other tragedies were just a matter of time. We sent some guns back, sold out our inventory of some others, and got out of the handgun business.

  It wasn’t a permanent decision. Years later, when we expanded into Texas, we found ourselves up against Academy Sports + Outdoors, a chain about one-third our size that was based in the Houston area. It didn’t take long to see that without handguns, we wouldn’t fare well against Academy, so after some long and really spirited conversation, we returned handguns to a few stores in Texas. That morphed into a few more stores. Today, I’m guessing we sell them in about 25 percent of our locations.

  But back to the initial decision: When we pulled the handguns, we didn’t announce it—we just transitioned out of selling them. Nobody seemed to notice. Then again, we were a smallish regional company. Nobody paid much attention to anything we did.

  So those were a couple of touchstones in the evolution of our corporate conscience about guns, and our responsibilities as a firearms dealer, before the Sandy Hook massacre. As in those cases, we decided after Sandy Hook to merely pull assault-style rifles from the shelves without announcing what we were doing. We had no desire to get into a Second Amendment debate; our aim was simply to satisfy ourselves that we’d taken action to limit the availability of weapons that seemed attractive to mass shooters.

  Which they certainly are. I’m writing this from the perspective of several years later, and the pattern that has emerged is undeniable: AR-15s and other military-style rifles are like catnip to the deranged. Don’t get me wrong—they’re popular with a wide range of buyers, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding citizens who never use them improperly. That sai
d, a proper use for them is elusive. In combat, they are terribly effective, but that’s all they have going for them. The military variant of the AR-15 has just one purpose: to kill people.

  And it might be that, right there—along with their scary appearance, and the badass, deadly aura they give anyone who totes one—that makes them so irresistible to people who get it into their troubled heads to slaughter a lot of innocents. Tick through the mass shootings of recent years, and you’ll find assault-style weapons figuring prominently in a great many, and at the center of the worst.

  So: I was not heartbroken to pull them. We put out the word to the stores, and late in the evening, down came the assault-style rifles. Ah, but this was not 1988 or 2001. Almost immediately, the word of what we were doing spread on social media. Some customers may have been in the stores and may not have liked what they were seeing. Without a doubt, some of our own associates were displeased with the policy. Either way, we came under attack on social media. We were caving to the left. We were antigun. We were denying people their Second Amendment rights. We were against the Constitution and hated America and its traditions. It blew up fast and furious, with a lot of people really upset with us, and within a day or two we were sitting on a full-blown public relations crisis.

  We’d expected some flak; the reaction to our 9/11 decision told us we’d get it. But we weren’t prepared for the ferocity of these broadsides and the huge numbers of people joining the fray. It was a wake-up call regarding just how passionate some people are about any perceived threat (perceived being the operative word here) to the Second Amendment. We’d challenged their core beliefs.

  Meanwhile, a customer and his young son, five or six years old, came into one of our stores near Sandy Hook Elementary, and as they passed the gun displays the little boy became highly distressed and screamed for his dad to get him away from there. When I heard that, I decided we had to go further in the stores around Newtown. This was Christmastime, when we have a lot of kids in the stores, and I didn’t want any to be confronted with a reminder of the trauma they’d just survived. I ordered those stores to take all the guns off the shelves until further notice—handguns, hunting rifles, the works. We shut down the gun departments there.

  The public frenzy over our wider assault-gun decision continued. Thousands of our customers let us know, often in really colorful language, that they’d never step into our stores again. We decided that we had to issue a statement. It was short and to-the-point. “We are extremely saddened by the unspeakable tragedy that occurred last week in Newtown, Connecticut, and our hearts go out to the victims and their families and to the entire community,” it read. “Out of respect for the victims and their families, during this time of national mourning we have removed all guns from sale and from display in our stores nearest to Newtown and suspended the sale of modern sporting rifles in all of our stores chainwide.”

  It didn’t cool any tempers, but at least it explained why we’d made the move. The thousands of people who promised to boycott us were true to their word. We lost their business, and it hurt. Dick’s went through a difficult time in the weeks and months after. We were overinventoried, not only in guns but in other departments where customers who felt strongly about their guns had shopped in the past. It took a long time to recover.

  But we weren’t about to change our minds. We took those rifles out of the stores because we felt it was the right thing to do—for us, and ultimately, for everyone. We didn’t want to sell them anymore, and we weren’t going to sell them. And as far as I was concerned, if some people didn’t like the way we ran Dick’s, they could take their business elsewhere.

  * * *

  Now, before you go off on a rant about how I’m a scourge to gun owners everywhere, let me point out that I’m one, myself. I support the Second Amendment. I have guns and respect them. I grew up around them. Ours was not a household where pistols were considered the devil’s right hand; they, along with rifles and shotguns, have helped put food on the table since long before I worked at Dick’s. As far back as I can remember, they’ve been part of my daily life. When I went to work at 345 Court Street, the hunting department was a busy place, especially in the fall, and in the course of a day’s work I’d often handle rifles, shotguns, and handguns, discuss them with customers, demonstrate their use. I unpacked them, assembled them, and put them on display. They hold no mystery for me. I see them for what they are: tools. And I understand that like any tools, they’re as good or bad as the person wielding them.

  It’s just that with assault-style rifles, we’ve presented the public with an all-too-effective tool and no appropriate job to do with it. On this issue, mine is not a voice in the wilderness. On September 13, 1994, the US Senate passed a ban of these weapons, which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on the same day. The vote came after former presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan wrote to Congress in support of a ban, citing a 1993 Gallup poll that showed that 77 percent of Americans favored abolishing the manufacture, sale, and possession of semiautomatic, assault-style rifles.

  The ban, a subsection of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, expired after ten years. Since then, no attempt to renew the ban has gained traction. And each year since, agreement of any kind on firearms control has slipped further out of reach.

  What happened after Sandy Hook illustrates my point. Five days after the shootings, President Barack Obama appointed Vice President Joe Biden to head up a task force charged with developing concrete proposals for stemming gun violence. Biden had a month to complete the job—a reflection of Obama’s grim understanding that the nation’s grief over Sandy Hook might not last. The task force immediately set about meeting with stakeholders in the gun control debate—the White House would later say Biden and his team heard from 229 different people or organizations in the course of their fact-finding. Among those vested interests were the big retailers who sold firearms.

  So it was that we were invited to be part of a delegation of retailers meeting with Attorney General Eric Holder in January 2013. We sent Dave Mosse, our general counsel, and another Dick’s lawyer, Beth Baran. Both had been building a government affairs specialty within our legal team and understood our need, as a corporate citizen, to not only hear out the government’s concerns but serve as a source of information; we had, after all, been among America’s biggest gun retailers for years and had practical experience to share.

  So David and Beth went to Washington. Before the meeting with Holder, they joined some gun sellers at a nearby law office and were surprised to find that most had sent not senior executives, as we had, but midlevel compliance officers, which suggests to me that they had no intention of getting involved in a substantive back-and-forth about guns or any other subject.

  And indeed, the talk among the other retailers at that pre-meeting get-together was centered on just one thing: so-called Fix NICS legislation, which would improve state mental health databases and get that data into the NICS system. They didn’t talk about a ban on any type of weapon or gun accessory. The attitude in the room seemed to be: Let’s not let anyone use this tragedy to leverage us into a reduction of rights.

  We didn’t have that mind-set, and I don’t think Walmart, which also was represented by senior executives that day in Washington, did, either. But it didn’t really matter, because once the retailers got to the meeting with Holder, it became clear that he didn’t have the time or inclination to dive deep on the subject. The gathering lasted maybe twenty minutes, during which there was no real attempt at conversation; later, David told me that it seemed a “check-the-box” exercise, enabling the Biden task force to say it had sat down with all who had a piece of the issue.

  Meanwhile, two or three weeks after Sandy Hook, I was down in Florida, on the golf course with John Boehner, then the Speaker of the House, and a couple of other guys. The country was still grieving and angry about the shooting. The airwaves were full of demands for commonsense gun reform.
The Biden task force was still at work.

  As we were getting ready to play, I looked at the Speaker and said, “John, what’s going to happen with gun reform?” He was a Republican, but so was I at the time, and I expected him to say that something had to be done, even if that something was pretty narrow. I wouldn’t have been shocked if he’d said that Congress might discuss resurrecting the assault weapons ban, or employing a universal background check, or—at the least—raising the minimum age for their purchase. I was good with all of those possibilities.

  Instead, he looked at me with a quizzical expression on his face, then shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.

  That shocked me. “Really?” I asked him. “Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Both sides can’t come together.”

  He didn’t explain, but I interpreted the remark to mean that Republicans and Democrats had become so entrenched in their positions, and the gulf between them had grown so wide, that both had come to view compromise as capitulation. To budge was to lose. And in fact, when the Biden task force finished its work, its recommendations were either hollow or unattainable. The one legislative recommendation from the task force that gained any traction—a modest measure on expanded background checks—died in the Senate that spring. Virtually nothing was done—not even the “Fix NICS” reforms the gun retailers favored.