A parade of companies made high-profile announcements of terminating discount and other affinity program relationships with the National Rifle Association after the Parkland shooting. Enterprise Car Rental, Symantec, Allied Van Lines, MetLife and more. Among the group was United Airlines which ended a discount program for NRA members.

Yesterday, at United’s annual shareholder meeting, United CEO Oscar Munoz was confronted with questions about the decision by a shareholder, Justin Danhof, the director of the National Center for Public Policy Research (“the nation’s leading proponent of free-market investor activism”).

As Bloomberg reports,

The shooter wasn’t affiliated with the NRA, the questioner said, “But hey, congratulations on your liberal virtue-signaling.” “Sir, it wasn’t political,” Munoz responded. “It was personal with regard to my family at United.” For Munoz, the tragedy hit home because one of the 17 people killed in the Florida massacre, Gina Rose Montalto, was the teenage daughter of a United captain. About a hundred pilots and other employees of United, JetBlue Airways Corp., American Airlines Group Inc. and FedEx Corp. attended her funeral, forming an honor guard at the entrance, according to news reports at the time. “That’s why we made the decision,” Munoz said. “We aren’t here to make political conversation or strike political debate. We’re here to serve customers.”

Just not NRA member customers. Danhof’s questions were a little more detailed that the Bloomberg report describes.

I suppose you are ignoring the fact that the NRA had nothing to do with what happened in Parkland and that the perpetrator had zero affiliation with the NRA. But, hey, congratulations on your virtue signaling. What exactly did investors get out of that? The company is willfully giving up money. That’s an odd choice for an airline company in a hyper-competitive industry.

Danhof then quoted Warren Buffet’s advice about separating business and politics and says Munoz refused to address the issue of the decision’s effect on the bottom line. Here’s the NCPPR’s press release on the exchange: