It's How We Play the Game

by Ed Stack

  We weren’t sure what that might look like and were still trying to sort that out when, on the second weekend after the shooting, Lauren alerted me that she’d heard from a well-connected friend in Washington. “He is observing the dialogue down in DC actively,” she wrote, “and believes there is mounting frustration with the lack of [political response to Parkland]. He feels that the tide might turn toward calling for boycotts on gun retailers such as Walmart and possibly us.…” That put a fire under me. I wrote back that I wanted “to make a statement before we are forced to make the statement we are planning to make anyway. I don’t want it to look like we caved.” Which meant moving quickly.

  We’d planned to hold an off-site strategy meeting beginning the next day. We should have canceled the thing and dived straight into figuring out how to get our message on guns out immediately. But we didn’t—we all convened in Sea Island, Georgia, the next morning, and only once we were there decided we should get back to Pittsburgh and hammer out a strategy, that it couldn’t wait. We spent maybe two hours on the ground at Sea Island.

  Back home, the team talked with our public relations advisers and proposed that we announce our decision on national TV—that we book an interview with one of the morning news shows as soon as possible so that I could explain what we were doing and how important we felt it was. I wasn’t enthusiastic about the suggestion. I’d been on TV a few times but was hardly a recognizable face, which suited me fine. There’s little real advantage to being a celebrity CEO. I enjoyed simply running the company.

  But the issue was extremely important to me, and to Dick’s. If we, as a major firearms dealer, recognized that the country’s gun laws had too many inconsistencies and not enough spine, we should stand up and say so. Maybe some good would come of it. And besides, I couldn’t stop thinking about those kids and parents in Parkland.

  Which worried me, because every time I did think of them, I got emotional. I was scared to death that I’d lose it on the air. Even so, I agreed to do two shows—ABC’s Good Morning America and the morning show on CNN. So it was that at 7:08 a.m. on Wednesday, February 28—two weeks after the shooting—I sat with George Stephanopoulos on the Good Morning America set.

  By sheer coincidence, that was also the morning that classes resumed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and the airwaves were packed with stories about the kids and how they were faring. While we were waiting to be ushered into the studio, I’d avoided the reports. And once seated across from Stephanopoulos, I kept one hand under the desk and pinched the hell out of a finger, hard enough to cause a fair amount of pain, just so that I’d stay focused and keep from tearing up.

  I told him how saddened we’d been by the attack, that we’d felt compelled to take action in response. We discussed the fact that the shooter had bought a shotgun from us. That had been part of our impetus for taking the assault-style rifles off the shelves, I explained: “The systems that are in place across the board just aren’t effective enough to keep us from selling someone like that a gun.”

  Stephanopoulos: “Any regrets at all about not taking a move like this sooner? After Newtown, after Sandy Hook, you announced a temporary suspension of assault weapons sales but then came back to selling.”

  Me: “We did. We said we were going to temporarily take them out of the Dick’s stores, the Dick’s Sporting Goods stores. We never put them back in the Dick’s stores. They’ve not been in the Dick’s Sporting Goods stores. And then, in 2013, we developed a chain, Field & Stream, which was a full-on hunting and outdoors store. And we put them in those stores.

  “But based on what’s happened, and looking at those kids, and those parents, it moved us all unimaginably.” I was fighting, here, to keep my voice from cracking. “And to think about the loss and the grief that those kids and those parents had, we said we need to do something, and we’re taking these guns out of all of our stores, permanently.”

  Stephanopoulos: “So yeah, no chance you’re going to reverse this?”

  Me: “Never.”

  Stephanopoulos: “Are you ready for the backlash?”

  “We are,” I told him. Over the previous few days we’d refined our estimates of what this move would cost us: at least $300 million in sales, possibly more. We estimated our business would be flat, or worse, for the year—in a company that rarely failed to see growth. I didn’t share all that, instead saying: “We know that this isn’t going to make everyone happy.”

  Stephanopoulos changed tacks. “You want Congress to act as well.”

  “We do,” I said. “We hope that they’ll act and pull something together. We don’t want to see the partisan politics, where one side espouses their position, the other side espouses their position, and they actually never do anything.”

  At the end, Stephanopoulos nodded. “It’s a big move,” he said. I walked out of the studio, relieved that it was over. Only really, the day’s excitement was just beginning. While I was on the air, my executive assistant, Vanessa Ellis, had mass-emailed a letter I’d written to every Dick’s employee. “Dear Associate,” it read. “Today, our Company is taking a stand in support of the kids in Parkland and all children across our Country who are unifying to have their voices heard following the tragic, unimaginable loss from gun violence.” From there, it laid out exactly what we were going to do in our stores and what we hoped Congress would do.

  At the same time that letter went out, we posted an announcement of our actions on the Dick’s website. Within minutes, the New York Times published a story about my ABC appearance. Members of the leadership team held a conference call with store managers.

  All of this happened fast, but not as fast as the public response. It was the number one trending story on Twitter. We had more than an hour before I was due to appear on CNN, so when we reached its studio I had a Coke and Lauren started to read some of the reactions to me from Twitter and elsewhere. She started with the nice comments. Thousands were writing to thank us. Some said they’d never shopped at a Dick’s store before but would now. There were so many warm, emotional comments from parents thanking us for making the world safer for their kids that I got choked up, listening—I told her to instead read me the nasty ones, so that I could get ahold of my emotions.

  And oh, there were so many to choose from. Most of the worst on Twitter have been removed, but here’s a sampling of comments made on newspaper websites just after they picked up the story:

  “I hope this goddamn place folds and goes under! They have always been politically correct.… Any hunters, target shooters or sportsman should cease doing business with this rathole, Dick’s. F**k ’em!”

  “This is FACISM.… You stupid puppets who can’t think for yourself will be the downfall of America as we know it. You gulp down propaganda like it was the word of god. You stupid sheep don’t know how YOU are being used.”

  “What the dickheads at dick’s don’t understand is, any weapon can be used in an assault. Assault is an action, not an object.”

  “I will never buy anything from a Dicks. I can not stand businesses that can not mind their own business.”

  “I will never buy from you again.… After serving nearly 30 years in the military, I don’t know how you can justify not selling a gun to a military member who may be under 21.”

  “As expected, the gun-hating maggots ooze forth from the cesspools of their ignorant fascist lives.”

  “In other news, Dick’s Sporting Goods announced a change in the company name to Pussy’s Sporting Goods which more accurately reflects the recent change in policy.”

  Believe me, there were worse. Much worse. Many hung some choice labels on me, personally. Some were even more poorly spelled and punctuated. But hearing this blowback had an invigorating effect on me. It got my adrenaline pumping. It pissed me off. And anger is a clean burn. When I went onto the CNN set for my sit-down with Chris Cuomo, I was no longer in danger of breaking up on camera. I was ready for a street fight.

  When I finished that interview, an av
alanche of interview requests was rolling in—we got more than four hundred of them. I wasn’t interested. We’d said as much as we needed to, and to continue going on TV to repeat the message would have made us look like publicity hounds. I said no to all of the requests but one: Lauren and our communications director, Jennifer Moreau, convinced me that I should do one evening news spot. We taped an interview with NBC that aired that night.

  By the time we left New York, all hell was breaking loose. The response of some people was so unhinged that Lauren and I both had security details for the next couple of weeks—we were tailed by serious-looking guys wherever we went, and they stood sentry outside our houses. Donna got a bit exasperated by it all. “Can you do me a favor?” she asked me. “The next time you decide to piss a lot of people off, could you not do it to guys who have guns?”

  About sixty-five of our own employees quit right away in protest, and more followed in later weeks, people up and down the organization. We have a cross-section of the country working with us, so it didn’t surprise me that some were upset with us. I felt how emotionally charged this issue is even more personally. A great friend of mine—a friend of twenty-five years, a guy I’d gone on vacation and had Thanksgiving dinner with—sent me some text messages about how upset he was. Then he sent me a video of some guy in North Carolina talking nonsense—you take my guns away, there’s gonna be hell to pay, etc. My friend wrote: “This is exactly how I feel.” I was in no mood for it. We didn’t communicate for months after that.

  But the negative backlash, hot as it was, was overwhelmed by the positive response to our decision. People came into our stores with donuts, pizzas, and flowers for the staff. We got thousands of emails and letters. The manager of our store closest to Parkland emailed us the day after my TV appearances. “Before yesterday, my community continued to struggle with healing,” he wrote. “That began to change at 7:15 AM yesterday. Thus far I have received 42 phone calls of support, and 17 walk ins that wanted to speak directly with the store manager.”

  People who needed nothing from us organized “buycotts” to give us business; one Los Angeles restaurant even offered a 10 percent discount to anyone with a Dick’s receipt. Even Jim Cramer, the financial guy on TV, said, “I applaud anyone with a conscience.” He doubled down on that later, saying that “if you’re hunting with an AR-15, you’re hunting humans.”

  And there was this: Walmart came out with its own announcement that they wouldn’t sell guns or ammunition to anyone under twenty-one, either. Kroger announced that its Fred Meyer stores, forty-three of which sold guns, would bump up the minimum age, too—and Fred Meyer would stop selling assault-style rifles at its stores in Alaska, the only place it made them available. REI, the Seattle-based outfitters, stopped taking orders from Vista Outdoor, which owned such respected outdoor brands as CamelBak, Bell, Camp Chef, and Bollé, but earned most of its money making and selling firearms and aligned itself closely with the NRA.

  We seemed to have started a shift. And momentum seemed to be building to something good.

  I Max Fisher and Josh Keller, “What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer,” November 7, 2017.

  CHAPTER 20 “BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO DO YOUR JOBS”

  What did we hope would happen in the weeks after our February 28 announcement? Well, for starters, we hoped that the groundswell against assault-style rifles would build. That Congress would start debating in some meaningful way about them, and ultimately reinstitute the ban that kept them off the market for ten years. We hoped that while they were at it, they’d take a hard look at the inconsistencies of gun laws in general.

  Consider that you have to be twenty-one to buy a handgun from a federally licensed firearms dealer, but you can lawfully buy a rifle—even an assault-style rifle—at eighteen. If you’re buying from an unlicensed seller, federal law says you only have to be eighteen to buy a handgun, and there’s no age restriction at all on shotguns and rifles.

  Here’s an inconsistency that makes even less sense: if I buy a rifle from a private seller on the Internet, I don’t have to undergo a background check unless the seller lives in another state. The loophole at gun shows is well documented. A gun show can take place across the street from Dick’s, and the rules for the sellers there will vary, depending on who they are. We and any other federally licensed dealers have to follow the same laws we’d follow in the store. But an unlicensed seller can show up with guns and sell them without background checks. Finally, there’s this outrage: If you’re on the no-fly list, you’ve been deemed too dangerous to sit on an airplane. But it won’t stop you from buying a gun.

  Where is the common sense here? It was this kind of inconsistency that convinced us we should put some muscle behind our talk about gun reform, so in March we made several trips to DC to speak with members of the House and Senate. A lot of the people we met had no grasp on the current laws, which was an unpleasant surprise. We met others who understood the laws but had no intention of changing them. A few others wanted such overreaching change that they had no hope of getting a dialogue going.

  In general, the Democrats were sympathetic but told us they were blocked from action by the Republican majority in both houses of Congress. The Republicans said they didn’t think there was need for reform. One of my conversations was with Senator Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, our own man in Washington. It got pretty spirited. He told me he thought that if a gun is broadly distributed, it ought to remain on the market. That didn’t make sense to me.

  “Would you support a ban on assault-style rifles?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said.

  “Would you support a ban on high-capacity magazines?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Would you support a requirement that everyone has to be twenty-one to buy a gun?”

  “No,” he said.

  I stood and thanked him for his time.

  That was by no means the only meeting I had that left me frustrated. I sat down with one Democratic congressman from a California district that had just seen its own mass shooting. “You know what I think we ought to do?” he asked me. “We ought to get some guys from the Golden State Warriors to come shop in your store for basketball shoes, and we’ll use that to build awareness of gun violence.” I was puzzled by the suggestion. “That doesn’t do much for me,” I said.

  “Well, another thing we’re thinking about is organizing a bike ride around building awareness of gun violence,” he said. “You could sponsor it. Or, if you wanted to, maybe you could come out and ride in it.”

  “Congressman, I have no interest in sponsoring a bike ride,” I told him. “I have no interest in coming out and riding in it, either. What I’d like is for you and your colleagues to find a solution to this problem—to come together with intent to fix it.” A couple minutes later his assistant came in and announced he was needed on the House floor for a vote, and the congressman left.

  A common thread running through several of these conversations was that it would be unfair to require all gun purchasers to be twenty-one when men and women can serve in the military at eighteen. Believe me, I’m tremendously grateful for those young people who choose to put on a uniform; I salute their bravery and patriotism. But we’re talking apples and oranges, because there’s a meaningful difference between a young marine or army private who’s been properly trained in the use of his or her rifle and an eighteen-year-old civilian with a bug up his ass and $200 in his pocket. Besides, it’s not as if eighteen-year-olds in the military walk around with guns in their hands 24/7. On base, the guns are locked up. When you get down to it, the whole military argument against age restrictions holds no water.

  But that didn’t keep people from making it. In the end, we didn’t get much traction in our trips to Washington. No one in Congress really wants to do anything about this issue, and we realized that our presence wasn’t bringing the change we sought. We aren’t finished: we promised to keep the conversation going
when we met with the families of slain students and survivors in Parkland—a visit made at their invitation, and during which I saw firsthand that they were every bit as courageous and committed as they’d seemed on TV. They were inspirations. We will keep pushing for reasonable gun reform, no matter how long it takes.

  Congress actually took one tiny step in the right direction. In an omnibus budget bill they adopted in March, the brave souls on the Hill authorized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct research on gun violence. They didn’t fund it, but they allowed it, which they hadn’t done in years. The National Rifle Association wasn’t pleased.

  Still, we weren’t where we wanted to be in keeping the issue in Washington’s face, so in April we hired a DC lobbying firm to help guide us. And let me tell you: if we were toxic before, now we were doubly so. Our lobbying prompted Springfield Armory to sever ties with Dick’s—to announce, in other words, that it would no longer supply guns for us to sell, because of all the disagreeable things we’d done. The company especially disliked our new age requirement, which it felt violated “a sacred right,” according to Springfield, “fought for and secured by American patriots and our founding forefathers.”

  Point of information: it’s Founding Fathers.

  A few days later, MKS Supply, makers of the Hi-Point and Inland Manufacturing brands of firearms, announced it wouldn’t do business with us, either, because we were compromising America’s “God-given freedoms.”

  “In recent months, Dick’s Sporting Goods and its subsidiary, Field & Stream, have shown themselves, in our opinion, to be no friend of Americans’ Second Amendment,” the company’s president, Charles Brown, wrote in a press release. He was wrong about that: we believe strongly in the Second Amendment; we just believe, as Justice Anton Scalia once said, that the second, like all amendments, is not without limitations. “Dick’s Sporting Goods and Field & Stream, in purportedly doing all of these things, have demonstrated that they do not share our values.” That part he got right. We don’t share their values.