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Sportsman’s Warehouse CEO Speaks Out on Cooper Firearms Controversy

By Bill Schneider, 11-04-08

Anybody who has been following the cyber-firestorm over pro-Obama statements and campaign contributions made by Dan Cooper, president and co-founder of Cooper Firearms of Stevensville, Montana, knows that as part of the collateral damage, life has gotten hectic at Sportsman’s Warehouse.

After the story broke on October 28 in USA TODAY and became the subject of my column on NewWest.Net five days later, gun owners angry with Cooper besieged Sportsman’s Warehouse’s 66 superstores and corporate headquarters with threats of a boycott if the company didn’t stop selling Cooper’s products. Then, gun owners angry with gun rights activists calling for the boycott went into those same stores threatening their own boycott if America’s Premier Outfitter didn’t continue selling Cooper products.

You got to feel for Sportsman’s Warehouse, obviously caught in the middle of a controversy they didn’t create, so I called CEO Stuart Utgaard. He was anxious to clear it up for us.

When I asked him why Sportsman’s Warehouse canceled Cooper’s orders it the first place, he said that wasn’t true. No orders were canceled, Utgaard insisted, and he challenged anybody at Cooper Firearms to produce a canceled order.

The whole story was fiction, he said. “Nothing has ever changed for us. This is a lot of hullabaloo about nothing.”

It’s business as usual at Sportsman’s Warehouse, Utgaard explained. “We currently have about $160,000 in Cooper products in inventory, and it isn’t selling well. We’ve had more product on order for 18 months that hasn’t shipped yet, so none of this really matters.”

All this happened long before Dan Cooper made his remarks, he noted.

“This whole thing has been blown out of proportion,” Utgaard said. “Larry Knight inappropriately expressed his personal opinion like it was the policy of Sportsman’s Warehouse.”

(Knight, vice president of sales, had been quoted on gun blogs saying he had canceled orders, and this same information also came to me confidentially, but now, it appears as if Knight overstepped his authority.)

“We don’t take sides on political issues,” Utgaard emphasized. “We want to sell to both Republicans and Democrats. Sportsman’s Warehouse treats Coopers rifles like any other product and will continue to do so.”

But, he pointed out, “Coopers is a very small player in the firearms industry. Their product is less than 0.2 percent of our firearms sales, and he probably hurt the sales of his own product. We’re already long on his product, and he just made us longer.”

“If Dan Cooper wants to back Obama, he is free to do so,” Utgaard emphasized. “We are not trying to impose our wishes on him. If some customers don’t want to buy his guns, that’s their choice to make. Thank God we live in a great country where you can express your opinion.”

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