No winners in battles between gun owners, corporations

I’m not a member of the National Rifle Association, but many of my friends are.

They work in the legal, financial, agricultural, industrial and ministerial professions. They are white collar, blue collar and no collar. They are of many races and religions.

When a major corporation equates them with evil people that commit evil against society, the good people respond the only way they can. They shun that company.

Dick’s Sporting Goods recently announced that it would no longer sell rifles with AR-15 style characteristics, or “modern sporting rifles,” at its Field & Stream outlets. It also announced that it wouldn’t sell firearms to anybody younger than 21.

The company could have done so discreetly, but it calculated a public relations benefit among its larger clientele of runners, fitness buffs and others who buy mostly footwear and apparel by doing it overtly. Dick’s even destroyed its inventory of modern sporting rifles, which was its right.

According to NASDAQ, Dicks underperformed the retail industry in April, and its shares fell 8.1 percent compared to 6.3 industry-wide growth. Zacks, an investment analyst, rates Dicks Sporting stock a 3, or “hold.” NASDAQ attributes the poor performance to declines in hunting and firearms sales. Sometimes you gamble and lose in the short term, but Dick’s will recover.

Yeti, on the other hand, gambled recklessly when it quit discounting its products for NRA members. Yeti is — or was — the top brand in premium coolers, specialty drink ware and branded accessories.

The reaction from NRA members was swift and severe, with Yeti owners shooting, blowing up or otherwise destroying their Yeti coolers, which is their right.

In a blink, Yeti lost its one advantage — the strength of its brand — over rivals in a highly competitive and ever tightening market.

Remember the ice-chest smackdowns we used to do every summer that pitted Yeti against the newest challengers? Yeti won the first two years, but much less expensive coolers beat Yeti the last three years of the competition. Nevertheless, Yeti was a status symbol, and owning one was a big deal. Not anymore.

In 2004, a squabble between the NRA and the Sierra Club split the Outdoor

Writers Association of America in two. It happened at an NRA-sponsored breakfast, when the Sierra Club placed its literature at all the tables that claimed the NRA and Sierra Club were “natural allies.”

Sponsors have exclusive rights to meal events at outdoor media conferences. The NRA’s speaker at the breakfast objected to Sierra Club’s attempt to piggyback the event and then stunned the attendees by listing the major unreconcilable policy differences between the two groups.

That was newsworthy at an event where news seldom occurs. Journalists should have been thrilled, but they weren’t. Much hand-wringing

ensued, and the OWAA board of directors censured the NRA for violating a canon about unethical treatment of supporting members.

In response, most of the “hook and bullet” writers left the organization. I let my OWAA membership lapse because I did not care to be part of a media organization that does not believe in freedom of speech and expression.

One of OWAA’s bigwigs at that time was Jim Low, a former news editor at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and later news services coordinator for the Missouri Department of Conservation. I worked with him for five years. He’s a great guy and a consummate professional.

Joel Vance, another MDC alumnus, is one of America’s greatest outdoor writers and a treasured friend.

Recently, Vance, Low and other OWAA luminaries signed a letter written by Daniel Ashe that was published May 9 by the Huffington Post titled, “An Open Letter From Hunters About Gun Reform.” It was a wide-ranging piece that advocated, among other things, banning modern hunting rifles.

A couple of sentences stood out in light of last week’s column about frugal traditionalists being disregarded in the management of public duck hunting areas.

“We don’t buy a lot of

guns,” the piece said. “We usually have a few favorites, often passed down to us by fathers or grandfathers. The gun industry figured that out decades ago, and switched to creating guns for a different market.”

A different demographic is driving the firearms industry nowadays, and by extension, driving state and federal conservation efforts. A great many of them are NRA members, and they don’t shoot up schools, music festivals and congressional softball games.

The OWAA guys, most of which are not NRA members, blamed them by association because of the products they prefer, and that was wrong.