Dick's Sporting Goods Chairman and CEO Edward Stack announced that the popular outdoor and sporting goods store will no longer sell "assault-style rifles" and will only sell guns to people who are over 21-years-old.
Stack told Good Morning America that the decision was made following the shooting at a high school in Florida that left 17 people dead.
"To think about the loss and the grief that those kids and those parents had, we said, ‘We need to do something,'" Stack, whose father, Dick, started the business 70 years ago, explained. "And we’re taking these guns out of all of our stores permanently."
He said that his stores follow the law, but "the systems that are in place across the board just aren’t effective enough to keep us from selling someone a gun like that."
"We did everything by the book,” Stack said of Cruz. “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.’"
Stack told CNN's New Day that he is ready to face any backlash from gun owners or the NRA.
"The hunt business is an important part of the business, no doubt about it. And we know there will be some backlash," he said.
He said that the management team discussed the issue and decided "we should be brave enough to take this stand."
"As we sat and talked about it with our management team, it was -- to a person -- that this is what we need to do," he said. "These kids talk about enough is enough. We concluded if these kids are brave enough to organize and do what they're doing, we should be brave enough to take this stand."
Stack said he supports the Second Amendment but doesn't want his company "to be a part of this story."
"We’re staunch supporters of the 2nd Amendment. I’m a gun owner myself," Stack said. "We’ve just decided that based on what’s happened with these guns, we don’t want to be a part of this story and we’ve eliminated these guns permanently."
In 2012, following the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school Dick's stopped selling assault-style rifles, but eventually put them back on sale at the company's Field & Stream stores.
Stack wrote an open letter to consumers outlining the new policy.
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