February 28, 2018 09:26 AM UTC

Dick's Sporting Goods Ditches Assault Rifles

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• by: Colorado Pols

USA TODAY’s Nathan Bomey reports:

Dick’s Sporting Goods is banning sales of assault-style weapons across all its stores after the Parkland, Fla. school shooting.

The nation’s largest sporting goods retailer announced the move in an open letter and an appearance by CEO Ed Stack on Good Morning America.

The retailer will also end sales of high-capacity magazines and sales of guns to people under 21 years old.

Assault-style weapon sales ended at Dick’s-branded stores after the Newtown, Conn. school shooting in 2012. But the company was still selling them at its 35 Field & Stream locations, which specialize in hunting and outdoors products.

As readers know, there have been no legal sales of high-capacity magazines at Dick’s Sporting Goods stores in Colorado since the state passed a 15-round limit on magazine capacity in 2013. There are also no Field & Stream-branded stores in Colorado, being with the exception of a single outlet in Oregon an East Coast chain. That makes this decision entirely symbolic in terms of impacts on our state.

Despite this we fully expect local gun enthusiasts to vent their fury on all area points of presence for Dick’s Sporting Goods, from their retail locations (where you couldn’t buy AR-15s since Newtown) to Kroenke Sports-owned Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Commerce City. These are the folks still spun up over the apocryphal story of magazine maker Magpul’s “flight from Colorado” after the 2013 magazine limit passed, which was in truth in pursuit of tax breaks not “liberty,” making this a cathartic axe for them to grind.

For the rest of us, we know where to buy our sporting goods.