Dick's Sporting Goods To Stop Selling Assault Rifles; Adds Age Requirement

Dick’s Sporting Goods announced on Wednesday morning that it was immediately ending all sales of assault-style rifles. As for the other guns they sell, they announced they will immediately start banning sales to people under age 21.

The announcement came on “Good Morning America,” where company Chairman and CEO Edward Stack made an appearance to explain the decision.

"Based on what’s happened and looking at those kids and those parents, it moved us all unimaginably," Stack said. Of course, he is referring to the recent Valentine’s Day school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which took the lives of 17 people. Since then, survivors of the shooting have become activists, outspoken about their stances on gun control.

Stack’s announcement comes not long after it was revealed that the alleged shooter behind the massacre in Parkland purchased a gun at Dick’s last year, ABC News reports.

“We did everything by the book,” Stack said. “We did everything that the law required and still he was able to buy a gun. When we looked at that, we said, ‘The systems that are in place across the board just aren’t effective enough to keep us from selling someone a gun like that.’"

Despite that fact, that particular gun purchased at Dick’s wasn’t used in the rampage. Still, Stack said he felt moved to take action.

"To think about the loss and the grief that those kids and those parents had, we said, ‘We need to do something,'" Stack said on the morning show. "And we’re taking these guns out of all of our stores permanently."

Dick’s is not the first major retailer to halt sales of semi-automatic weapons. In 2015, Walmart announced they were stopping the sales of high-powered rifles, the New York Times reports.

[Photo: Getty Images]