Walmart pulls violent game displays, will still sell guns
Retailer will still sell games, hasn’t made gun sales changes.
— Walmart has NEW YORK ordered workers to remove video game signs and displays that depict violence from stores nationwide after 22 people died in a shooting at one of its Texas stores but will continue to sell guns.
In an internal memo, the retailer told employees to remove any violent marketing material, unplug Xbox and PlayStation consoles that show violent video games and turn off any violence depicted on screens in its electronics departments.
Employees also were asked to shut off hunting season videos in the sporting goods department where guns are sold. “Remove from the salesfloor or turn off these items immediately,” the memo said.
Walmart will still sell the violent video games and hasn’t made any changes to its gun sales policy, despite pressure from workers, politicians and activists to do so.
“We’ve taken this action out of respect for the incidents of the past week,” Walmart spokeswoman Tara House said in an email. She declined to answer any questions beyond the statement.
“That is a non-answer and a non-solution,” said Thomas Marshall, who works at Walmart’s e-commerce division in San Bruno, California, and has helped organize a petition to get the company to stop selling guns. He said they plan to email the petition, which has more than 53,000 signatures, to Walmart CEO Doug McMil- lon on Friday.
After the massacre at the El Paso Walmart, McMillon said the company “will be thoughtful and deliberate in our responses.”
Walmart is the largest seller of guns in the United States, although it has gradually limited the types of fire- arms it offers in its stores. It stopped selling assault-style rifles in 2015, citing lower consumer demand. It sells handguns in only one state, Alaska.
After the mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school last year, Walmart Inc. banned sales of firearms and ammunition to people younger than 21.
The massacre in El Paso was followed by another shooting hours later in Dayton that killed nine people.
President Donald Trump blamed “gruesome and grisly video games” for encour-aging violence Monday, but there is no known link between violent video games and violent acts.
The United St ates has had 254 mass shootings — instances of four or more people being shot in indi- vidual outbreaks — in 2019, according to the Gun Violence Archive. That’s more mass shootings than days so far this year.
Scott Galloway, a market- ing professor at New York University, said the move to hide violent imagery in stores was “a cheap attempt to distract consumers and the media from the real issue, which is, Walmart continues to sell guns.”
Other companies have made changes after t he shootings. ESPN postponed the airing of an esports competition for shooting game “Apex Legends.” And NBC Universal pulled some ads for its upcoming movie “The Hunt,” which depicted char- acters hunting and shooting at each other.