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Sunday Strategist: Walmart’s History of Gun Violence

Sunday Strategist: Walmart’s History of Gun Violence

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Let’s start with 1999, when a Wisconsin man walked into a Walmart, killed his ex-girlfriend and her fiancé and then himself. In 2002, a shoplifter shot a Philadelphia security guard in the chest. In 2005, a customer in New Mexico shot a man who had come to the Walmart to stab his ex-wife. A North Carolina Walmart employee held fifteen co-workers hostage in 2009. A year later in Reno, three employees were shot by a fourth. In 2014, a married couple went on a killing spree that ended in a shootout inside a Las Vegas store. Two months later in Ohio, a Walmart customer was killed by police who thought the BB gun he’d taken from a shelf was a real gun. Just after Christmas, a toddler in Idaho took his mother’s concealed weapon from her purse and shot her in the head. There was a murder-suicide in Texas in 2016 and in 2017 a gunman opened fire on customers in a Colorado store. A few days before the El Paso massacre that killed 22 people, two Walmart employees were killed by a recently suspended co-worker in Mississippi. This list doesn’t even include parking lot shootings; by some estimates 80% of Walmart’s crime happens outside its stores.

Walmart rarely talks about store shootings in public. Its annual reports mention terrorism, natural disasters and other “operational risks” that may adversely affect individual stores, but not gun violence. For years, chains like Target and Starbucks banned customers from bringing guns on their premises, but until last week Walmart deferred to local and state laws. 

But unlike Target and Starbucks, Walmart is both the site of gun violence and one of the largest sellers of guns in the U.S. If the company wants people to stop shooting each other, it’s going to have to stop helping them do it. Ideally it’ll manage this without alienating the hunting and gun enthusiasts who make up a sizable portion of its customer base, especially in rural areas. 

Walmart's boldest attempt to regulate gun sales happened in 2008, when it partnered with the nonprofit now known as Everytown for Gun Safety. (Everytown was founded by Michael Bloomberg, who also owns Bloomberg Businessweek's parent company, Bloomberg LP.) The retailer started filming firearm sales and created a computerized log that would make it easier to trace Walmart-purchased guns later recovered in crimes. These changes actually made Walmart’s regulations stricter than the federal government’s.

But Walmart still sold guns, including semi-automatic weapons. After 26 children and adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, Walmart took the weapon used by the gunman, the Bushmaster AR-15, off its website. But three years passed before it stopped selling semi-automatic weapons all together. 

The events in El Paso and Mississippi proved the company needed a more hard-line strategy. The majority of gun murders in the U.S. involve a handgun; last week Walmart vowed to stop selling handgun ammunition and, in Alaska, the guns themselves (Walmart hasn’t sold handguns in the other 49 states since the 1990s). It’s also "respectfully" asking customers to stop bringing guns into its stores. In theory, that should make it a lot harder for people to shoot each other in the toy aisle.

This week Kroger, CVS and Walgreens followed suit with their own open- or concealed-carry bans. Congress may not care enough to do anything about gun violence but the companies and employees affected by it do.

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