Fortune magazine is reporting on the "tumbling" stock price of Dick's Sporting Goods, a company which recently made headlines for having decided (again) to stop selling modern sporting rifles in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, FL, and for discriminating against military-aged persons under 21 who wish to purchase a firearm.

According to Fortune, Dick's is experiencing "deeper than expected" losses and sinking stock prices.

From the article:

Only weeks after winning accolades from gun-control advocates for ending sales of assault rifles at its Field & Stream stores, Dick’s posted a deeper-than-expected sales decline. Its stock sank the most in four months Tuesday in the wake of the quarterly report, which reflected struggles with excess inventory and deep discounting. ... Shares of Dick’s fell as much as 7.3 percent to $30.19 in New York, the biggest intraday decline since mid-November. They had climbed 13 percent this year through Monday’s close.

"There's going to be some pushback and we expected that," CEO Edward Stack said in an earnings call with Wall Street analysts. "There are going to be the people who don't shop us anymore for anything."

Stack went on to say the decision is "not going to be positive from a traffic standpoint and a sales standpoint."

Which are, you know, the kinds of things people who invest in retail businesses want to see.

Notice also what Stack isn't expecting. He's not expecting a flood of new customers who support the company because of their anti-gun policies. That's because while anti-gun forces own the media and anti-gun billionaires invent astroturf gun groups, the millions upon millons of actual Americans, represented by grassroots gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Buckeye Firearms Association (BFA), love the Constitution are voting with their pocketbooks.

There is a vast difference between groups such as the NRA or BFA, made up of millions of individual paid members, and groups which espouse a gun control point of view and claim to represent a majority of the country, but which have very few, if any, actual paid members.

In 2005, I was priviledged to sit down with University of Toledo Professor and author Brian Anse Patrick to discuss this abstract, invisible "majority" anti-Second Amendment groups claim to represent.

Patrick, who I am sad to report passed away in December of 2016, had also recently met with the OCAGV's executive director, Toby Hoover, in her Toledo office while preparing for an upcoming book.

"When I asked about membership," Patrick said, "Hoover answered the question by asking another question - 'how does one define membership?' Well, apparently they do it by fiat - claiming to speak for an abstract public.

"Last Spring I read a news media piece in which Hoover criticized the Ohio CCW law on its first anniversary because only 45,000 or so people had obtained permits in the first year. This, said Hoover, indicated that the law was bad because such a small portion of the public was thereby represented. However even this 45,000 dwarfs OCAGV - which appears to have no tangible, mass membership at all - even though it claims to speak for millions."

Professor Patrick then cited J.M. Sproule's Propaganda and Democracy. "Sproule has an interesting discussion of these abstract publics - made up by interpreting attitudinal survey data and constructing these interpretations as a "public" when in fact no such public may exist. My impression is that the coalition is made up of several religious/neighborhood organizations that are similar in make up - a small paid professional staff that claims to speak for an abstract, invisible public. It's a social work missionary model. Overall the coalition seems a top-down affair, functioning more or less in the model of missionary or social work, than any kind of mass membership grassroots citizens group.

"I don't know if OCAGV has only two members," Patrick told me, "but its primary, perhaps sole manifestation as an organization or coalition seems to be two professional staff members in the basement of a church in downtown Toledo: Toby Hoover, the executive director and a secretary/receptionist."

"Those of us fighting for gun rights have all the same advantages we've always had," BFA Executive Director Dean Rieck observed in the wake of the Parkland, FL-inspired media onslaught. "Real people. Lots of people. Cultural traditions. Patience. And to top it all off, we have practical, proven solutions. Those who want to do something that will actually help reduce the bloodshed should be listening to us."

Chad D. Baus is the Buckeye Firearms Association Secretary and an NRA-certified firearms instructor. He is co-founder of BFA-PAC, and served as its Vice Chairman for 15 years. He is the editor of BuckeyeFirearms.org, which received the Outdoor Writers of Ohio 2013 Supporting Member Award for Best Website.

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