Dick's Sporting Goods, one of the nation's largest outdoor gear retailers, said today it is ending it sale of assault-style rifles in stores and ban sales of guns to people younger than 21.
"Based on what's happened and looking at those kids and those parents, it moved us all unimaginably," Dick's Chairman and CEO Ed Stack said today on "Good Morning America," referring to the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 14 students and three educators.
"To think about the loss and the grief that those kids and those parents had, we said, 'We need to do something,'" Stack said. "And we're taking these guns out of all of our stores permanently."
Stack said the retailer began scouring its purchase records shortly after the identity of the suspected Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz, became known. The company soon discovered it had legally sold a gun to Cruz in November, though it was not the gun or type of gun used in the school shooting.
"But it came to us that we could have been a part of this story,'' Stack told The New York Times. "We said, 'We don't want to be a part of this any longer."
Dick's Sporting Goods operates more than 700 stores, including one in Hamilton Village on Gunbarrel Road in Chattanooga.