Dick’s Sporting Goods, one of the nation’s largest sports retailers, announced this morning that it’s immediately ending sales of all assault-style rifles at all of its stores, The New York Times reports.
Headquartered in Pennsylvania, the retailer has eight stores in Louisiana, including one in Baton Rouge at the Mall of Louisiana. The company also says it will no longer sell high-capacity magazines or sell a gun to anyone under 21 years of age, regardless of local laws.
The announcement by CEO Edward Stacks comes two weeks after a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 students and staff members. It’s one of the strongest stances taken by corporate America in the national gun debate. It also carries symbolic weight, coming from a prominent national gunseller.
Stack says the company began scouring its purchase records shortly after the identity of the suspected Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz, became known, and discovered it had legally sold Cruz a gun in November—though not the one used in the shooting.
“But it came to us that we could have been a part of this story,’’ he says. “We said, ‘We don’t want to be a part of this any longer.’”
