Walmart Says Pulling Assault Rifles From Shelves Not Political


Walmart is to stop selling Modern Sporting Rifles (MSR) such as the AR 15, often referred to as assault rifles by gun control groups. Weapons like these have been used in mass shootings in the recent past, including the Colorado theater shooting and the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. According to Walmart, however, this is merely a coincidence. Walmart spokesperson Kory Lundberg told Forbes that the decision was driven “largely by consumer demand”.

Walmart, America’s largest single firearms retailer according to Fortune magazine, says that less than a third of its stores carried assault type weapons in the first place, and that lagging sales have caused them to drop them from its fall lineup. The coming season will see assault rifles being replaced by shotguns and other weapons more traditionally associated with hunting.

Firearms purists do not class MSR as “assault,” but most gun control groups do, citing their appearance, high-magazine capacity, and pistol grips, among other reasons. This perception has been hardened by the gun control debate currently raging in America, following a long series of tragic mass shootings. In the midst of these storms, Walmart has always maintained that its policy with regard to firearms sales is to sell any legal weapon so long as there are customers to buy it. This would appear to be belied, however, by what some believe to be public opinion-sensitive behavior, with Walmart stopping sales of handguns with high-capacity magazines, and generally restricting sales in stores across the country over the last decade and a half.

On the other hand, Walmart recently fought and won a court battle to stop the Trinity Wall Street Church, one of its shareholders, from putting the sale of assault type firearms to a shareholder vote. The motion was fought all the way to a federal appeals court, with Walmart arguing that any attempt to regulate the items they put on their shelves would be unreasonable and unsustainable, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Usually, gun sales spike in the wake of tragedies such as mass shootings, or at any other time when there is a possibility of tighter regulation of gun ownership. Then, when these fears subside, sales tend to dip back down again. Walmart, however, says that the sales of these assault type weapons have been flagging for some time, leading to a phased reduction of these rifles which had been going on “for a while”.

Walmart expects that their MSR range should be completely phased out “over the next week or two”.

[Picture via Getty Images]

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