Dick's Sporting Goods is doing more to fight the NRA than President Donald Trump — or, for that matter, most of the Republican Party.
"Thoughts and prayers are not enough," the company said, in response to the Parkland high school shooting. "Following all of the rules and laws, we sold a shotgun to the Parkland shooter in November of 2017," the company disclosed. Although it was not the gun used by Nikolas Cruz during the shooting, Dick's Sporting Goods said, "it could have been" — and as a result, Dick's decided to alter its policies on how it sells firearms and call for common sense federal legislation on gun control.
Dick's said it will stop selling assault-style rifles and high capacity magazines. They also won't sell guns to anyone under 21.
But the company is also urging politicians to do the same — they're also calling for "universal background checks that include relevant mental health information and previous interactions with the law, ensure a complete universal database of those banned from buying firearms and close the private sale and gun show loophole that waives the necessity of background checks."
Edward Stack, the chief executive of Dick's Sporting Goods, told "Good Morning America" what pushed him to act.
"We’re staunch supporters of the Second Amendment. I’m a gun owner myself. We’ve just decided that based on what’s happened with these guns, we don’t want to be a part of this story and we’ve eliminated these guns permanently."
Unfortunately for America, Trump and the Republican Party do not share Stack's determination to prevent future mass shootings. During a gathering of America's governors on Monday, Trump omitted any reference to a policy he had earlier supported — raising the minimum purchasing age. The reversal came after he met with NRA leaders for lunch on Sunday, during which he was urged to retract the position and shift to school safety programs, according to CNN.
Federal efforts to effectively respond to the Parkland school shooting have been stymied by the fact that Republicans control both the presidency and Congress, and the GOP is in the NRA's pocket.
As a result, Trump and congressional Republicans have offered a muddled range of divergent proposals that carefully avoid meaningful regulation on firearms, according to The New York Times. The most popular one, which the Times described as "new incentives for public agencies to submit information that could disqualify prospective gun buyers to the National Instant Criminal Background Checks System," is widely recognized to be a bill mostly for show, as it would do little to stop mass shootings and is not opposed by the NRA.
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