Color me skeptical about this announcement, made the same day as the Virginia shootings:
Walmart said that it is in the process of pulling modern sporting rifles such as the AR-15 from stores this week, instead focusing more on selling other sports and hunting firearms.
The decision is related purely to lack of customer demand, says Walmart spokesman Kory Lundberg, not the spate of shootings that have occurred in the past year, including one Wednesday in which two TV journalists were killed during a live interview near Roanoke, Va. Lundberg says the decision was made earlier this year.
While I don’t particularly care if Walmart sells AR-15s or any other firearm, the transition from AR-15s to “other sports and hunting firearms” is a bit too much in line with the Obama “hunting and [target] shooting” view of the Second Amendment for my tastes. Indeed, Wal-Mart CEO Douglas McMillon expressed this goal back in June:
Our focus in terms of firearms should be hunters and people who shoot sporting clays, and things like that, So the types of rifles we sell, the types of ammunition we sell, should be curated for those things.
It’s also consistent with the recent Walmart pattern of following where the Left leads on key cultural issues, including attacking the Arkansas version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act with this astoundingly sanctimonious statement from McMillon:
“Every day in our stores, we see firsthand the benefits diversity and inclusion have on our associates, customers and communities we serve,” Wal-Mart CEO Doug McMillan said in a statement posted to Twitter. “It all starts with our core basic belief of respect for the individual. Today’s passage of HB1228 threatens to undermine the spirit of inclusion present throughout the state of Arkansas and does not reflect the values we proudly uphold.”
And let’s not forget that Walmart stopped selling any merchandise depicting the Confederate flag after the Charleston shooting (although my search moments ago on Walmart.com for “Soviet posters” yielded fruitful results.)
My first job was selling guns at a Walmart in my hometown of Georgetown, Kentucky. So I’ve got some affection for the company. I appreciated that they paid me 35 cents over the minimum wage – a whopping $3.70 per hour — and Sam Walton was a great American. But now Walmart is facing serious market pressure from stores like Dollar General and online from Amazon.com. I’m not sure that becoming just like every other large liberal company is the best way for Walmart to maintain customer loyalty — loyalty built on a foundation of rural and suburban (and therefore conservative) southern shoppers.