Walmart employees at the corporate offices in California and two other states staged a walkout on Wednesday to mark their protest and demand that the retail giant stopped selling guns. Two shooting incidents recently at Walmart stores left 24 people dead and over dozens injured.
According to the US media, around 40 employees walked out of the Walmart corporate office in San Bruno, California for 15 minutes. They marked a moment of silence for those killed in the shooting incidents at their stores in Southaven, Mississippi and El Paso, Texas. They also demanded that Walmart stop selling guns.
Walmart is reportedly among the biggest sellers of firearms and ammunition in the United States.
Employees at the retail giant's e-commerce office in New York City and Portland, Oregon also marked their protest.
Two Walmart employees were killed and a police officer was injured on July 30 when a disgruntled employee opened fire at the Southaven store in Mississippi.
On August 3, a white supremacist killed 22 people and injured a dozen others at the El Paso store in Texas.
A few workers said that they had to do something and not feel complicit as Walmart continued to sell firearms. Several signed a petition on Change.org calling for Walmart to stop selling guns. It has reportedly gathered over 43,000 signatures as of Thursday.
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon has said that the company will respond to the shootings in a “thoughtful and deliberate way”.
But company officials have said that Walmart's policy on gun sales has not changed. The nation's biggest employer with 1.5 million workers also said that there was no significant activity in response to the call for a walkout.
Walmart stopped selling handguns in 1993 and assault-style rifles in 2015. It stopped selling guns to anyone under 21 after last year's Parkland shooting.
