Anti-Gun Dick's Sporting Goods Hit Again, Loses Leading Firearm Supplier Mossberg
When it comes to Dick’s Sporting Goods, the firearms industry isn’t playing around.
Less than a week after the National Sports Shooting Foundation unceremoniously kicked Dick’s out of its association, and the gun-making giant Springfield Armory announced it would no longer do business with the Pennsylvania-based retailer, another big name in firearms took its own shot at Dick’s.
Maybe the lesson will take this time.
In a news release on Wednesday, O.F. Mossberg and Sons announced it was cutting ties with Dick’s and its subsidiary retailer Field & Stream.
“It has come to our attention that Dick’s Sporting Goods recently hired lobbyists on Capitol Hill to promote additional gun control,” Mossberg & Sons CEO Iver Mossberg said in the release.
“Make no mistake, Mossberg is a staunch supporter of the U.S. Constitution and our Second Amendment rights, and we fully disagree with Dick’s Sporting Goods’ recent anti-Second Amendment actions.”
How did it come to this?
Apparently caught up in the nationwide anti-gun hysteria that followed February’s mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — and the bizarre pseudo-celebrities who created hysteria — Dick’s not only decided to end sales of the AR-15 rifle, it went a step further and hired an anti-gun Beltway lobbying group to attack the Second Amendment in the nation’s capital.
That takes matters from a difference of opinion on business decisions to a fundamental confrontation on American liberties. Dick’s is a private company and can choose what it wishes to sell and to whom. Its retention of the anti-gun Glover Park Group lobbying firm turned it into a political opponent of millions of law-abiding Americans who choose to exercise their rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment.
Mossberg’s statement made it clear that Second Amendment supporters are taking that seriously.
And before that, statements from the National Sports Shooting Foundation and Springfield Armory made it clear, too: American freedom is not a game.
When National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch posted word of Mossberg’s decision on her Twitter account, it drew out plenty of gun grabbers who like to troll Loesch and the NRA. But they don’t sound like the kind of people who’d be shopping at a sporting goods store anytime soon. Posts from actual customers or potential customers, though, should have pounded the message home.
Dick’s has started a fight it might not be in a position to finish:
I liked sporting good stores, but I will never shop at Dick’s Sporting Goods again. I do not care if I have to go without.
— Chad Bullard (@chadbullard2) May 9, 2018
Good. Mossberg is the largest American Firearms Manufacturer, with 90% of its manufacturing in Texas and 10% in Connecticut. I am glad that they cut off DICKS.
— Lewis Thompson (@LewisTh54372726) May 10, 2018
AWESOME!!!! Its about time that these companies started getting more aggressive about the future of gun rights and their industry
— TXRobK (@TXRobK) May 9, 2018
Dick’s decisions to join the gun grabbing side in American politics have brought the company plenty of positive ink from the anti-gun mainstream media. (The Washington Post, with implied approval, called it a “big statement.”)
But the hits keep coming from the firearms sporting world, where Dick’s has become such a pariah that the venerable magazine Field & Stream felt it necessary to issue a news release to remind the public it has nothing to do with Dick’s or Dick’s subsidiary, also named Field & Stream.
“We understand how that could be confusing for many, but it is the truth. The two brands are owned by different companies and are in no way related,” the magazine’s release stated. (You can bet the bad PR has them sweating bullets.)
Dick’s should be getting the message by now that respectable elements in the firearms and outdoors goods businesses are not happy with the way the company is funding attacks on the Second Amendment.
And when it comes to Dick’s Sporting Goods, they’re not playing around.
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