Walmart sees gun culture for what it is: a huge liability

This is not Sam Walton’s America.

Children are outfitted for the first day of school with bullet-proof backpacks that fearful parents purchased along with pencils, crayons and erasers.

Grade school teachers learn the protocols of active shooter drills, highly aware their split-second decisions may mean life or death to students.

Shoppers case out store exits and scrutinize fellow customers, just in case a mass shooter shows up in the toilet paper aisle.

None of these grim realities is what Walmart’s founder would have wanted for the United States.

For many years the company was one of the top sellers of firearms and ammunition. Then one of its stores in El Paso, Texas, became the scene of carnage when a right-wing racist went hunting for Latino victims to gun down.

On September 3, Walmart announced it will scale back its footprint in gun and ammunition sales. The company will no longer sell “short-barrel rifle ammunition” such as the .223 caliber and 5.56 mm caliber “that, while commonly used in some hunting rifles, can also be used in military-style weapons.” It will also discontinue sales of handgun ammunition. Despite being treated like a postscript, that portion of the announcement makes a large statement as so much gun violence — murders, assaults and suicides — are committed with handguns. Walmart stopped selling handguns in all states but Alaska in the mid-’90s and will now phase out in that state too.

It will continue to sell guns and ammunition for hunters and sport shooters. That’s fitting, as Walton was a quail hunter, a factor that played into his choice of moving to Bentonville, Ark., near where he opened what would become the first Walmart in 1962.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon framed the decisions as a response to a number of factors. Foremost, of course, was the El Paso attack in August, in which dozens were shot and 22 people died. That rampage followed the shooting deaths of two Mississippi Walmart store managers by a disgruntled employee.

But there are likely other reasons as well, more in line with the business acumen that the frugal Walton was known for: risk management, loss aversion and careful control of image.

Even in the rural communities Walton aimed to serve, so at home with hunting rifles and other weapons, guns increasingly are the totems of a conservatism that has curdled into an ideology of paranoia and hate.

Walmart, in its announcement, asked people to refrain from openly carrying firearms in its stores. It’s not a big ask for 2019. A 20-year-old walked into a Springfield, Mo., Walmart shortly after the El Paso mass shooting. He wore body armor, carried a loaded military-style rifle and had a semiautomatic on his hip. He filmed himself on a cellphone, wanting to test what he might term the company’s “respect” for the “Second Amendment.”

He accomplished panic. The store was evacuated, as managers understandably feared a mass shooting. He’s been charged with making a terrorist threat despite the fact that Missouri is an open-carry state.

Increasingly, Americans are not soothed by the presence of visibly armed people as they shop for basic household items. They don’t think “good guy with a gun.” They think, “Is this a mass shooter?”

Walmart’s movement away from firearms, outside of hunting and sport shooting, should be viewed as an astute retailer’s read on the American public.