away from its outdoorsy roots.
Just two years later, Walmart made it harder to buy firearms at the stores that were still selling them. The
company signed on to a plan led by then-New York mayor Michael Bloomberg that created a computerised
log of purchases, introduced stringent inventory controls and set up systems to film every firearm sale.
Bloomberg-backed news website The Trace, which covers guns in America, said the move made Walmart’s
policies tougher than the federal government’s background checks.
But when the economic recession took hold in 2009, Walmart’s sales slumped. And after a five-year hiatus
at most of its locations, the company started filling up shelves with shotguns, rifles and ammunition, as The
Wall Street Journal reported in 2011.
It was part of a larger push to bring back “heritage categories” such as sewing and outdoors equipment after
Walmart’s attempts to carry more “upscale” products backfired, according to The Journal. Gun sales were
also on the rise at that time, driven in part by fears of regulation by a Democratic administration. Half of
Walmart’s nearly 4,000 stores, including some in urban areas, started selling firearms again.
In 2012, after the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, Walmart resisted calls to stop selling assault-
style rifles such as the Bushmaster AR-15, which a gunman used to massacre children and teachers at Sandy
Hook Elementary School. But the company did remove a listing on its website for the weapon out of
sensitivity for the victims, a spokesperson told CNN at the time.
Meanwhile, in the weeks after the attack, semiautomatic rifles sold out at Walmart locations around the
country. The company even had to ration ammunition sales after Barack Obama’s re-election.
Three years and numerous mass shootings later, however, Walmart did stop selling the AR-15 and similar
weapons. The announcement came on the same day a television journalist and her videographer were shot
and killed during a live broadcast in Virginia. Walmart said its decision was not related to that incident nor
any other high-profile shooting. “This is done solely on what customer demand was,” company
spokesperson Kory Lundberg said. “We are instead focusing on hunting and sportsman firearms.”
Some retail experts were sceptical, among them retail consultant Burt Flickinger, who said the decision to
drop assault-style rifles reflected a leadership that was paying closer attention to social issues. “It shows that
the Walmart of this decade is quite different from the prior four decades,” Mr Flickinger said at the time.
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who has headed the company since 2014, has stressed he wants to cater to
hunting and sports shooting – the things Walton enjoyed. “Our focus as it relates to firearms should be
hunters and people who shoot sporting clays and things like that,” he told CNN in 2015. “We believe in
serving those customers, we have for a long time, and we believe we should continue to.”
That message came up again last year. In February 2018, two weeks after the mass shooting in Parkland,
Walmart said in a statement it had “taken an opportunity to review our policy on firearm sales”. “Our
heritage as a company has always been in serving sportsmen and hunters,” the statement read, “and we will
continue to do so in a responsible way.”
It is unclear whether the Walmart in El Paso sold firearms at the time of the shooting, or where the suspect
obtained his weapon.
The Washington Post