An 18-year-old Michigan resident has filed a lawsuit against the Dick’s Sporting Goods chain after the store refused to sell him a rifle, according to WJBK, a Fox News affiliate in Detroit.
The plaintiff in this case is Battle Creek high school senior Triston Fulton. He went to a Dick’s store in Troy and attempted to purchase a rifle. When he provided identification, according to the report, he was not even allowed to look at a rifle because of the store’s newly-adopted policy of selling only to people over age 21.
Attorney James Makowski told WJBK that this amounts to age discrimination under the state’s Elliot Larson law.
In an interview with the station, Makowski asked a question of his own: “Stores should be able to violate people’s civil rights? Are we going to stop allowing black people firearms? Are we going to stop allowing Mexicans to buy firearms? No.”
The attorney said his client is a hunter and he asserted that Dick’s is “discriminating against a whole group of people based on age.”
This lawsuit and another one in Oregon could set off a spate of similar challenges to the age limit set by the stores