(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Walmart Inc.’s problem with guns isn’t about the ones in video games.
The past week brought that into sharp focus, first when its El Paso, Texas, store was the scene of a mass shooting that left more than 20 people dead. Even as the weekend turned more deadly and attention shifted toward a second incident in Dayton, Ohio, scrutiny remained on the retailer, which plays a role in nurturing gun culture by being among the nation’s largest sellers of firearms.
So far, the company has said it has no plans to stop selling guns, which are available in about half its stores. Chief executive Doug McMillon pledged earlier this week that the company “will be thoughtful and deliberate in our responses” to the incidents, leaving open the possibility that the company might take some sort of action. Then on Friday, Walmart made a relatively trifling gesture of response, saying it would eliminate displays of violent video games and movies from stores.
It may be that Walmart will end up making it through this particular spasm of violence relatively unscathed, save for some backlash from a small group of employees and some harsh headlines. But the retail giant is just going to continue to find itself coiled in this debate. At some point, the pressure to take more forceful action won’t be so easy to escape.
Walmart has already taken steps that make it more restrictive on gun sales than federal law requires. It hasn’t sold handguns (except in Alaska) since the early 1990s and ceased selling assault-style rifles in 2015. In 2018, after the Parkland school shootings, it raised its minimum age to buy a gun to 21. But the chorus is growing louder from gun safety advocates calling for sweeping reform on this issue. The federal government has failed the public with inaction so many times on gun safety, eyes are going to keep to turning to Walmart – with its 1.5 million employees and more than $500 billion in annual sales – as a potential catalyst for change.
This is going to be a tricky needle for Walmart to thread. The retailer’s empire is heavily fortressed in rural America, a stronghold for hunting and conservative politics. Hunting is entwined with Walmart’s origin story, too. Founder Sam Walton was an avid quail hunter; he wrote in his autobiography that part of the reason he initially settled his family in Northwest Arkansas was that the location – close to the state lines with Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas – made it accessible for him to participate in four different states’ quail-hunting seasons.
Still, Walmart faces fair questions about how much that past should continue to inform its present. Gun sales are thought to comprise a negligible portion of its revenue. It wouldn’t, then, be a particularly great financial sacrifice if it further restricted gun sales or did away with them altogether. So the company has to ask itself: Given the momentum on this issue, are the risks of sticking with its current policies, at some point, going to outweigh the risks of making dramatic change?
All sorts of incidents, big and small, will continue to bring this issue to the fore. On Thursday, an armed man wearing body armor entered one of its stores in Missouri, a type of incident that could initiate conversation about its policies on carrying firearms in its stores. In a Saturday Facebook post about the El Paso incident, McMillon wrote, “I can’t believe I’m sending a note like this twice in one week” – because he had only days earlier had to address a shooting in one of its Mississippi stores that left two workers dead.
Undoubtedly, Walmart isn’t to blame for the horrific events in El Paso. But it will just keep finding itself hauled into a fervent and fast-changing debate on the topic. So long as it sells guns, it will have this problem. And it’s not going away.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Beth Williams at bewilliams@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Sarah Halzack is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the consumer and retail industries. She was previously a national retail reporter for the Washington Post.
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