Coverage: Wal-Mart will no longer sell semiautomatic firearms

After Wednesday’s tragic on-air shooting, mega-retailer Wal-Mart announced it would no longer sell high-powered assault rifles come fall. And while the decision was a welcomed change from the nation’s largest gun retailer, a company representative insisted the decision was based on customer demand not politics.

Shannon Pettypiece of Bloomberg summed up the announcement:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will stop selling military-style weapons such as the AR-15 rifle this fall, citing declining customer demand for the controversial firearms.

Wal-Mart will replace the guns with other types of rifles, as well as shotguns and other hunting merchandise, said Wal-Mart spokesman Kory Lundberg. The AR-15 model has been used in mass shootings, including at a school in Newtown, Connecticut, three years ago. But the move was a business decision based on sales and wasn’t politically motivated, Lundberg said.

“If you have a product customers aren’t buying, you phase it out,” he said. Shoppers “were buying shotguns and rifles, and so we are increasing assortment in that.”

The company will continue stocking ammunition for the AR-15.

Wal-Mart has been selling modern sporting rifles, the industry term for guns that look like the military-style M-16 rifle, at about a third of its U.S. locations. In 2006, the company reduced the number and variety of guns it offered in stores and replaced them with more upscale products such as exercise equipment. It then reintroduced firearms to many locations in April 2011, part of a broader strategy to add back merchandise and boost sales growth at U.S. stores.

Wal-Mart, based in Bentonville, Arkansas, doesn’t disclose how much money it makes selling guns.

New York Times reporter Hiroko Tabuchi described how Wal-Mart’s decision might be more than it appears, despite what the company’s representative says:

Though Walmart attributes its decision to falling demand, sales of long guns, which include assault rifles, have held steady. Firearm background checks for long guns under the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, considered one marker for sales, have fluctuated between five million to just over seven million in recent years.

“Sales of rifles are up,” said Arkadi Gerney, a senior vice president at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. He said that no consistent federal statistics were available about the numbers being sold, but “what people in the industry say is that these assault rifles are an increasing portion of rifle sales.”

Still, Mr. Gerney, a gun policy expert who worked with Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, in developing guidelines on gun sales for retailers, said he believed that the company’s sales of these weapons had slowed because it had tightened background checks and taken other measures that might have dissuaded some gun buyers from patronizing its stores.

“In my experience working with Walmart in 2008, I found them to be extremely concerned about responsible gun sales,” he said. “They definitely wanted to stay in the market and serve customers who wanted to buy guns, but they were very interested and responsive to ideas about how to make those sales safer and to make it less likely that the guns that they sell were ultimately misused.”

“Our focus as it relates to firearms should be hunters and people who shoot sporting clays, and things like that,” Mr. McMillon told CNN in June. “So the types of rifles we sell, the types of ammunition we sell, should be curated for those things.”

Limiting the types of guns it sells is the latest in a series of steps that the company has taken to burnish its image as a corporate citizen.

Paul Ziobro of The Wall Street Journal explained how the decision is the latest in series of recent changes for the Arkansas-based retailer:

The retailer has long held that it will carry products, including firearms, to serve hunters and sportsmen, but it doesn’t sell items such as adult films, or music with explicit-lyric warning labels or, outside of Alaska, handguns. Earlier this year, it vowed to remove merchandise from its stores that depicted the Confederate battle flag.

Wal-Mart has also faced pressure from shareholders to stop selling these items. New York’s Trinity Wall Street Church tried to get the retailer to have shareholders vote on a resolution that would have required Wal-Mart’s board to review management decisions to sell such weapons, as well as any other products that could harm the company’s reputation. Wal-Mart objected to the resolution, saying the matter involved everyday business decisions.

The disagreement went to court and Wal-Mart prevailed in June when a federal appeals court said the shareholder resolution didn’t have to be put to a vote.