It's How We Play the Game

by Ed Stack

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  Looking back on it, amid my frustration and horror at the day’s events, I felt compelled to do something—to make some gesture that not only ensured we wouldn’t be part of the story when these events happened, but that also threw light on the alarming regularity of the tragedies and maybe, just maybe, provoked a wider response.

  That seemed even more necessary when, shortly after I sent that email, our corporate manager of investigations ran the Parkland shooter’s name through our files and came up with a hit. “The shooter has been identified as Nikolas Jacob Cruz, 19,” he wrote in an email to the Dick’s leadership team, “and he is linked to the purchase of one Maverick 12 gauge shotgun.

  “The gun was sold at a Dick’s Sporting Goods, store 684, Boynton Beach, FL on 12/9/17,” the message continued. “He also purchased 12 gauge ammunition on 11/21/17 and 11/25/17 from the same store.” My God. There it was. A mass shooter had armed himself at a Dick’s store. “At this time,” the email concluded, “it cannot be definitively determined if the gun purchased from the company was used in this incident.”

  Donna and I drove to a restaurant a few minutes from the house and about an hour’s drive from Parkland. What followed was not a romantic Valentine’s Day dinner. From where we sat, we could see TVs over at the bar, tuned to continuing news coverage of the murders. Students who’d survived the mayhem were interviewed on-screen, along with a procession of rattled parents. We couldn’t hear what they were saying, but we didn’t need to. The story was all too familiar.

  Donna and I talked about those parents—how we couldn’t imagine seeing our own kids off to school, to a supposed safe haven, a place we trusted to look after them, then getting a frantic afternoon call from a friend or another parent, asking: “Have you seen the news?” The terror that would bring—or, many times worse, the blood-freezing experience of having the police show up at our door, speaking the unspeakable—would be a parent’s worst nightmare.

  That the Parkland massacre fell on a day traditionally devoted to love made the brutality of the act all the harder to get our heads around. How many Valentine’s Day mornings had we sent our kids out of the house with a kiss, expecting that the hours ahead would be filled with the promise of puppy love? Donna had tears in her eyes. “If that ever happened to us, I don’t know how I could go on,” she told me.

  It was hard not to personalize the deaths. My own kids weren’t long out of school. This could have been them. I got pretty emotional, sitting there. I felt so strongly for the parents. Couldn’t fathom what they were feeling and didn’t want to try too hard to do it—it seemed so big a hurt that it scared me. I felt even more resolved that we had to do something.

  We weren’t much in the mood to linger long after dinner. Back at the house, we turned on the TV and watched more of the coverage. We couldn’t stay away from it. And by now, more details were trickling out. The shooter had arrived by Uber shortly before classes were dismissed, had pulled a fire alarm, and had stood in the hall as the kids left their classrooms, slaughtering anyone who came within range. And he hadn’t used a shotgun—meaning he hadn’t used the weapon he’d purchased at Dick’s. He’d used an AR-15. News reports indicated he’d fired one hundred fifty rounds in six and a half minutes.

  While we sat in front of the TV, the Dick’s team was busy back in Pittsburgh, preparing to answer any questions that might arise from our having sold this lunatic a firearm. Those questions would almost surely come, regardless of whether he carried that particular firearm into the school. Shortly before eleven p.m., Lauren sent me a draft of a statement we might release “if we should get embroiled in a discussion” about this suspect. She and the staff were continuing to work on it, she said, but in the meantime she wanted my feedback.

  The statement said that we were saddened beyond words by the loss of life. It noted that the shooter “did not purchase the firearm involved in Wednesday’s horrific tragedy from our store.” If the word was out that this guy had shopped at Dick’s, we’d acknowledge selling him a shotgun but stress that he “purchased the gun in compliance with all state and federal laws and background checks.” It concluded by underlining our commitment to the safety of our customers, our employees, and the communities we served.

  “Sounds good,” I wrote back. “This is such a tragedy! I feel like we are watching Sandy Hook all over again!”

  I knew, even as I typed, that we’d have to do more. Limiting our response to denying that we’d had a role in this particular tragedy wasn’t near enough. We were a major gun retailer. We had to be part of a solution. Besides, if this guy bought a shotgun from us, he could have bought any firearm. It was an accident of geography that we hadn’t sold him the AR-15. We didn’t have any Field & Stream stores in Florida, but we had five of them within a ten- or eleven-hour drive of Parkland—one in South Carolina, one in Georgia, and three in Alabama—and thirty more across the country. Soon enough would come other mass murders, and the next time we might find ourselves the ones who’d put the weapons in the shooter’s hands.

  Through the next day, and for two days after that, Donna and I seemed to spend more time in front of the TV than at any other point in our marriage. We were riveted by the most remarkable part of the Parkland story, which came after the smoke had cleared: the surviving students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas stepped forward and declared that no other teenager should ever endure the heartache and fear they knew—that every American kid had a right to safe schools, a right to live without menace from guns. The country’s “grown-ups” had failed them. They couldn’t fail others. The violence had to stop here.

  And this was clearly not going to be a short-lived campaign. These kids were serious about keeping the issue of guns and school safety in the country’s face. “Never Again” was their battle cry. They were incredibly well-spoken in front of the cameras. I marveled at their courage. And the parents of slain students expressed their anger and sense of loss with a steady-nerved eloquence that I knew I couldn’t have mustered. Donna and I found ourselves shaking our heads in wonder and feeling, at some level, a certain degree of guilt—one we shared with America’s other political and corporate leaders. All of us, an entire generation, had shirked our responsibilities. We were failing the nation’s children. We had to do something.

  Fueling my sense of urgency was a bit of unwelcome news from Vermont. Just a day after the Parkland shooting, a troubled eighteen-year-old was arrested after making detailed plans to shoot up his former high school in rural Fair Haven. An alarmed friend turned him in, precluding an attack, but a check of our files revealed that we’d sold him a twelve-gauge shotgun that he evidently intended to use.

  I’m not much of a crier. I’m a pretty stoic guy. But over those days in Florida I cried more than I’d cried since my mother died. So that weekend, I wrote a first draft of a position paper for Dick’s. It opened by saying how much respect we had for the young people behind the “Never Again” drive, and that our thoughts and prayers were with “so many of you that have lost loved ones, friends and mentors.” But thoughts and prayers weren’t enough, I wrote. “We need to take action to address this problem.”

  I then offered a list of recommendations. Some were vague—the first item on the list was “revision of gun laws”—but others were aimed at specific targets: A “ban on assault-style weapons.” A change in laws nationwide “to include 21 as the required age for buying guns.” A ban on the bump stock. A nationwide waiting period for gun sales, during which a buyer’s social media posts, as well as his or her criminal record, would be checked.

  “We respect the Constitution and the Second Amendment, and we are not asking for a ban on guns,” I wrote. “We sold Cruz a shotgun. While it was not the gun used in the Parkland shooting, it could have been. We followed all the rules and still sold a gun to this kid.”

  Further along, I switched from “we” to “I.” “I encourage our lawmakers to come together to find a solution to this problem,” I wrote. “That’s
your job! The country needs for you to put partisan politics aside and thoroughly discuss and pass a practical solution. We do not want to hear partisan discourse, and we implore each side to work toward a comprehensive solution. This is too important.”

  I was in emotional turmoil when I wrote one of the final points I made in the document: “Until we are confident there are checks and balances that ensure we are not going to sell a gun to someone who plans to walk out of our store and kill, we are suspending the sale of guns.”

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  Monday morning, back in Pittsburgh, we convened a meeting of the leadership team. We start each week with a meeting as a matter of course, but this one was hours earlier than usual, and everyone knew that the Parkland shooting had affected me in a big way. I opened by saying we had to take some dramatic action. I said, “We have to take a stand here. We don’t want to be part of this. And we can actually do something about it—a small thing, maybe, but it’s a start. And we should.” I had the draft with me and started to read it—and halfway through, I got so choked up that I couldn’t speak. Our chief of staff, Ami Galani, took the paper from my hand and read the rest of it.

  All ten people in the room favored most of the points I’d made in my draft. Just one caused concern—suspending the sale of guns. Some people asked: Are we sure we really want to do that? The problem, they pointed out, wasn’t all guns—it was specific weapons. And what kind of impact would such a move have on the bottom line? I didn’t care about that second point and said so. It seemed the right thing to do, and that was more important to me than earnings. I asked them: “Do we have to wait for this to happen to one of our kids?” Well, okay, Lee Belitsky said, but I’m just going to run some numbers so we have them. We’re a public company, and we’re going to have to guide the Street about what we’re doing, and the first thing everyone will want to know is how it will affect revenue and earnings.

  The conversation turned to discussing in greater detail just how extensive this suspension of sales should be. And really, that conversation continued for the next six days, because as a group we found it a tough question to fully answer. Here was the issue: the margin rate on guns was not great, but hunters bought not only guns, they also bought hunting coats, boots, socks, and a host of other products that are very profitable. All told, our hunting and outdoor business approached $1 billion in sales per year.

  Beyond that, hunting had been a mainstay of Dick’s business since the company’s earliest days. It remained an important category for a lot of our customers. If we stopped selling guns altogether, we’d be punishing those customers, some of whom had been with us for sixty years—men and women who knew to treat firearms with respect and who used them for legitimate sport. Did it make sense to needlessly alienate loyal Dick’s customers who bought shotguns and deer rifles, and were law-abiding and do-right citizens?

  The draft I read at that February 19 meeting was just that, and over the following week it went through a lot of changes as we tried to come up with a stance that made a strong statement but wasn’t pointlessly broad. Even as we talked, the “Never Again” movement was gaining traction, and we started getting calls from customers and the public at large, asking whether we planned to take any action on guns.

  Eventually, we reached a consensus that we might have more impact if we narrowed our focus down to the actual source of trouble—the guns favored by mass shooters. Which is to say, AR-15s and similar rifles, along with the accessories that went with them. We had never put assault-style rifles back on the shelves at Dick’s after Sandy Hook, but as I’ve mentioned, we did sell them in our thirty-five Field & Stream stores.

  You might think that we wouldn’t have much at stake by pulling just the assault-style rifles: how much money could we lose by cutting one type of product at just 5 percent of our stores? Ah, but that’s not how this works. Guns are such a polarizing issue that we stood to lose a lot of customers. There were millions of people out there who might not have owned or wanted an AR-15, but who would be plenty pissed that we’d removed them from our stores, and I mean angry enough that we’d never see them again.

  We’d learned that after Sandy Hook. We’d won accolades from a lot of people after we pulled those rifles from Dick’s, but we got an equal or greater response from people who vowed they’d never give us another penny. A couple of years later, the folks who’d supported our decision didn’t even remember we’d made it. But you can bet that the people we’d pissed off remembered, and they’d been true to their word. They never came back.

  So there was a lot more to lose than just the income from a few rifles at a few stores. The people we’d anger didn’t just buy firearms from us. They bought baseball gloves, running shoes, and sportswear for themselves and their families. We estimated that the damage would amount to well over a quarter-billion dollars. The numbers crunching that Lee undertook after we met that Monday soon arrived at that figure: two hundred and fifty million dollars in sales, at a minimum. We got our finance group working on it and ultimately concluded that we could survive the blow. We’d have to work hard at it, but we thought we could offset the loss by boosting sales in other categories.

  Even if we fell short, I was okay with it. The choice seemed plain. If those kids from Parkland could muster up the courage to take their fight to the country, we had to be brave enough to make this move. Still, it would hurt. And we’d take flak for some of the other pieces of our emerging position. We proposed to pull large-capacity magazines along with the rifles and reaffirm our commitment to never carry bump stocks. We would no longer sell any firearm to anyone under twenty-one years of age, though many state laws allowed teenagers to buy and possess rifles and shotguns.

  As Friday approached, we made arrangements to consult with the board of directors. We have an active board. It meets quarterly, plus once for a strategic meeting each year. Its Audit Committee meets an additional time each quarter to review our performance and our strategy for releasing and framing our quarterly results. So it’s very hands-on, very involved. Naturally, the members would want to chew on what we were proposing to do.

  As we often do when we have an urgent matter to discuss with the board, we set up a telephonic board meeting. Actually, we set up two—one to unveil our plans, and a second after the members had had time to digest it, to get their official approval. Before the first call, I spoke with Bill Colombo about what we had in mind. With all we’d been through together, I owed it to him. And, of course, I valued his input—though I was pretty sure he wouldn’t like the plan. Bill had long been a vocal defender of Second Amendment rights. He had a permit to carry a concealed handgun. He was an active target shooter.

  Sure enough, he pushed back. Yes, he said, the country had a real problem on its hands, but it wasn’t with guns—it was with the people who used them. The shooter at Parkland had used an AR-15, but if he hadn’t had that, he would have used another weapon, perhaps the shotgun he’d bought from us. And if he couldn’t get to that, he might have used something else. The problem was the nut job, not the implement he chose.

  I understood his argument, though the New York Times had not long before published a report that made a convincing case that our “astronomical number of guns” does, in fact, contribute to the higher incidence of mass shootings in the United States, compared to other countries.I The article relied on a 2015 study that found a strong correlation between a country’s rate of gun ownership and the likelihood of mass shootings there. I believed we owed it to ourselves, as well as our fellow Americans, to take a principled stand. Somebody had to be the first to do something, instead of talk about it.

  Bill ultimately supported our decision, despite his reservations. The board as a whole supported us as well, though not without questions about the effects of our plan on sales and earnings. The board shares our fiduciary duty to our shareholders, and they wanted reassurance that we’d thought this through. Satisfied that we had, they gave us the green light.

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r />   I suppose that the fact that I sat down and wrote up that draft manifesto in Florida suggests that I always intended to take a public stand about guns in the wake of the Parkland shootings. But I don’t know that I did: when I read—or tried to read—the draft to the leadership team, I viewed it as an internal document, a position paper that we could use to guide our corporate behavior, but not something that we’d necessarily be sharing with the outside world. My default style in such circumstances is to simply take action without announcing it, as we had after Sandy Hook.

  But members of the leadership team were quick to remind me that that approach had blown up in our faces in 2012. Because we never spelled out what we were doing when the assault-style rifles vanished from our shelves, we opened the door to others with their own agendas to interpret our actions to the public. We lost control of our own narrative.

  None of us wanted to see that happen again. So by the time we consulted with the board, we were mulling how we might make it absolutely clear what we were doing and why. We needed to reach three different constituencies with the message: our customers, first and foremost; our stockholders; and not least, our teammates, the forty thousand people who worked for the company.

  It seemed to me that we ought to simply release the edited statement, which announced the changes we were putting into effect at our stores, and also urge Congress to get off its collective duff and get its act together on some meaningful reform. Put that out, pull the guns from the stores, and be done with it.

  Our leadership team, along with our outside public relations consultants, argued that if we wanted to have the greatest possible impact with our announcement—if we wanted to truly influence public opinion—we might want to go bigger than a press release. This is a big deal, they said. This deserves something more.