Ed Stack, the CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods, is on a campaign to make sure everyone knows that he and his company are sufficiently woke to be allowed out in polite society. Over the weekend he did an interview with CBS News in which he explained what they had done to curb gun violence in America and the great cost they absorbed to do so. And what was the magic cure? They turned five million dollars worth of AR-15 rifles into scrap metal. (The Hill)

The CEO of Dick’s Sporting Goods says that after the company made the decision to no longer sell assault-style rifles, more than $5 million worth of the weapons were destroyed.

In an interview with CBS News that aired Sunday, Ed Stack said following the decision last year to stop offering assault-style rifles, the question of what to with the remaining inventory lingered.

“I said, ‘You know what? If we really think these things should be off the street, we need to destroy them,'” Stack said, adding that the company turned $5 million worth of the weapons into scrap metal.

I’m not a stockholder in Dick’s Sporting Goods and I haven’t set foot in their store since all this nonsense started, so I suppose I really don’t have a horse in this race. But if I were one of the shareholders, I think I’d be a bit put off right about now. The company intentionally converted millions of dollars worth of valuable merchandise into barely recyclable metal. How is that a good business model? Even if they didn’t want to sell them to the public they could surely have sold them off in bulk to another retailer and recouped some of their losses.

Stack is right about one thing, however. They’ve definitely paid a price for all of this. Three years ago the company’s stock was trading at sixty bucks per share. This week it’s hovering around 38 dollars. And what effect did he think this was going to have on the availability of legal firearms? One adept observer of the story took to Twitter and pointed out the obvious.

The manufacturers already made the money off those guns. Now they'll simply make more to sell to other gun shops, and double their profits. Seriously, if I was a shareholder in Dick's, I'd be demanding that the CEO step down for incompetence, and for politicizing the company.

— DLM (@Duaners) October 7, 2019

Precisely correct. The manufacturer of those firearms has long since been paid and turned a profit. Part of those profits will certainly be reinvested to manufacture even more firearms to sell to all of the shops that are picking up business in the form of Dick’s lost customers. And speaking of picking up business, gun sales in August surged fifteen percent over the previous year and ranked the highest sales figure ever recorded for that month.

So Ed Stack can keep patting himself on the back all he likes. He hasn’t changed the number of rifles being sold. He’s only changing where people do their shopping. How long will the shareholders continue to put up with a CEO that’s driving down their profits in the name of being woke?