Our view: Companies step in where Congress fears to tread
As students who survived semiautomatic slaughter at a Florida high school on Valentine’s Day returned to class this week, their piercing demands for commonsense firearm restrictions remained unmet by lawmakers in Washington.
In the face of uncertainty on Capitol Hill, another option for these strongwilled students is to pressure corporations to step in where Congress fears to tread.
The students notched one victory on this front Wednesday when a major retailer, Dick’s Sporting Goods, announced that it would stop selling assault-style rifles altogether, and block sales of high-capacity magazines and other guns to anyone under 21. “We love these kids and their rallying cry, ‘enough is enough.’ It got to us,” Dick’s CEO Edward Stack said.
The action by Dick’s follows decisions by a host of companies — including United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Best Western and MetLife — to sever discount deals with the National Rifle Association, even in the face of thuggish threats by NRA supporters.
More broadly, financial institutions have an opportunity to drastically slash sales of these assault-style weapons, which were used to kill 17 students and teachers in Parkland, Fla., this month and, before that, to end 26 lives in a Texas church in November, 58 lives at a Las Vegas concert in October, and 26 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.
Emergency doctors who treated the victims at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School spoke of how these weapons of war have a unique capacity to shred internal organs with their highvelocity rounds.
If credit card companies, processors and issuers threatened to cut off retailers who insist on selling this one category of gun, sales would undoubtedly plummet. Few gun retailers would want to become all-cash businesses.
Within the banking industry, Bank of America has already begun querying, in the context of responsible behavior, clients who manufacture assault-style weapons. And in 2016, Visa advanced a lengthy written commitment to corporate responsibility.
New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin — who first floated the concept of leveraging the credit industry to curtail the sale of assault-style rifles, high-capacity magazines and “bump stocks” used to render rifles into machine guns — said his interviews with CEOs reveal that many are amenable to these good works, if worried about NRA-led boycotts or even threats to employees.
The Douglas High School survivors have already set the standard for true courage in facing up to the gun lobby with their demand to halt sales of this one category of guns. And the public is fully on their side, favoring — by more than 2-to-1 — a ban on assault-style weapons.
If politicians don’t have the backbone to do the right thing, corporate America just might help lead the way toward saner gun policies.