BREAKING: Dick’s Sporting Goods won’t sell guns at Gardens Mall store
Dick’s Sporting Goods, one of the nation’s largest sporting goods retailers, has decided that it will not sell guns or ammunition at its proposed Gardens Mall location, city officials said Wednesday.
Shannon Yeakel, the company’s director of real estate development, told city officials in an email Friday that there are no plans to include the sale of those items in its planning and zoning application, city spokeswoman Candice Temple said.
In October, Dick’s broached the topic of gun sales in a letter to city officials, asking if there “anything prohibiting the sale of firearms (long rifle only) and ammunition” in the second-floor space the company plans to sublease from Sears.
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Interim deputy city manager Stephen Stepp, who was the city’s police chief at the time, responded with questions about how the company planned to maintain a safe atmosphere at the mall, which analysts say sees between 8 million and 10 million visitors a year.
“You go with an expectation at the mall that you’re not going to see somebody walking through the mall or walking through the parking lot with firearms,” Stepp told The Palm Beach Post in October.
Dick’s did not return a call for comment Wednesday. It was unclear whether it had agreed not to sell firearms or ammunition at any of its other stores nationwide.
In February, in the aftermath of the Valentine’s Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 students and faculty, and wounded 17 others, the company announced that it would no longer sell assault weapons or high-capacity magazines, and that it would stop selling guns to customers younger than 21.
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The age restriction has prompted at least two lawsuits against Dick’s, one by a 20-year-old man in Oregon and one by an 18-year-old man in Michigan.
Neither mall ownership nor the city was eager to have Dick’s move into space long occupied by Sears at the east end of the mall, prompting a years-long legal battle that began in 20111 and ended last July when judges from the Fourth District Court of Appeal ruled in the retailers’ favor.
The spat began in 2011, when mall’s owners, Forbes/Cohen Florida Properties, objected to negotiations between Sears and Dick’s to take over the second story of Sears’ store at the east end of the mall. The stores had entered into their negotiations without going through the mall’s owner.
The Palm Beach Gardens City Council also objected, passing a measure requiring the mall’s anchors to get their approval to divide space for subleases. The court ruled that the measure was unconstitutional.
Dick’s offer not to sell either firearms or ammunition at the high-end mall follows two incidents in late 2017 involving guns on the mall property.
On Nov. 17, police say a Riviera Beach man fired 14 shots at a car as it sped away from the lot. The driver had thrown a punch at the gunman at the food court entrance, police said. The gunman said the driver had pointed a gun at him and his mother, who was with him at the mall that day.
On Nov. 29, two people were arrested following a gun sale gone bad in the mall parking lot.