Scott Weber, 63, has seen department stores enter and exit the firearms market over the years, and remembers poring over pages of gun ads in the Sears catalog while growing up on a farm.
Big retail chains such as Sears “have them and then they don’t,” said Weber, who owns Gunrunner Firearms & Auction. That’s why he thinks the decision by Dick’s Sporting Goods to pull guns out of nearly one-fifth of its 700-plus stores will probably make no more difference than similar shifts in the past.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Weber also predicted the move won’t necessarily boost sales for independent dealers such as himself unless they happen to be located near one of the affected stores. Instead, the gun sales Dick’s might have made will be absorbed by rival chains such as Bass Pro Shops or its subsidiary, Cabela’s, which together comprise 200 stores.
Dick’s had lost many of its gun buyers already, he believes, after halting sales of the top-selling AR-15 semi-automatic rifle following its use in a mass killing at a Florida high school in 2018.
“A lot of my customers talked about it,” recalled Weber, whose business is based in Wyoming and Ohio. “They said, ‘I’ll never shop there again. It’s anti-2nd Amendment.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s a really bad move. Watch.’ And their stock started tumbling and people started not going in there.”
Pittsburgh-based Dick’s Sporting Goods’ latest financial report, published this week, confirmed the slump in its firearm sales. A drop in the hunting business, which includes guns and ammunition, helped drag down revenue from stores open at least a year by 3 percent in the most recent quarter, CFO Lee Belitsky said.
In response, CEO Ed Stack decided to replace hunting equipment with other merchandise in 125 stores, a tactic he tried out in 10 locations last year.
[Related: 9th Circuit: Second Amendment protects right to openly carry firearm in public]
“If it goes as well as expected, we would probably take another batch of stores next year,” Stack said. “This is around having productive space. And there’s some places that the hunt business is very good, other places that it’s not very good.”
For the full budget year, the company’s sales dipped 1.8 percent to $8.4 billion. Since the gun sales announcement this week, its shares have tumbled 7.6 percent to $34.98.
Analysts think Dick’s has sent the message that it’s moving away from firearms sales, and those sales are moving elsewhere.
“All Dick’s has done to themselves is alienate their customer base,” said David Almasi, vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, whose Free Enterprise Project invests in publicly traded companies and uses its status as a shareholder to advocate for conservative policies.
At the annual meeting of Dick’s shareholders last year, Almasi and Justin Danhof, the head of the Free Enterprise Project, pressed Stack on the company’s decision to raise the minimum age for firearms purchases in the aftermath of the Florida high school shooting, which left 17 dead. He plans to return this year.
In the meantime, Almasi doesn’t expect stores like Bass Pro, Gander Outdoor or Walmart, which has more than 5,000 U.S. stores, to stop selling guns or ammunition. Cabela’s megastore in Gainesville, Va., has the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms etched in its walls, he noted.
[Also read: Democrats push to regulate ‘ghost guns’]
“If anything, these other companies now have a clear warning of what will happen to them” if they take actions perceived as unfriendly by gun rights advocates, Almasi told the Washington Examiner.
And even if more bricks-and-mortar retailers do stop firearms sales, there are plenty of digital alternatives.
“You can get any gun you want on the Internet,” said Weber, the owner of Gunrunners. “It can be shipped to your hometown dealer. You do your FBI check, pay them a small fee, and you’ve got the gun. Who needs Dick’s?”
