- Trucking heavyweight Saia will no longer transport firearms, Freight Waves reported Monday.
- Firearms were already a small part part of businesses like Saia's, the outlet added.
- The move comes in the wake of shootings in New York, Texas, and elsewhere.
Trucking heavyweight Saia will no longer transport firearms, Freight Waves reported Monday.
Last week, the Georgia-based logistics and shipping company publicly updated its rules so that it would not move around firearms that are put together already or close to being so, the outlet reported.
Saia's latest "rules tariff," (which describes prices and other policies) is dated Monday and has on its list of banned or restricted items, "Firearms to include handguns, rifles, assembled and unassembled."
Saia is an "LTL carrier," which means it transports goods for customers or shipments that don't take up an entire truck.
Freight Waves noted that these "LTL carriers" were already not particularly keen on shipping guns before gun violence came to national prominence again recently, because of their potential to be stolen and the problematic image in general.
"I would feel safe to say that most LTL companies today would shy away from the commodity due to the risk," Rex Oliver, director of operations at Atlantic Logistics, told Freight Waves in an email.
The company will still move individual parts of guns and ammunition, Freight Waves added.
Gun violence has become more visible for many in the US lately after a racist attack in a Buffalo, New York grocery store and in Uvalde, Texas and others that followed.
There have been 246 mass shootings so far in 2022, as of Sunday, Insider reported.
Few corporations have responded publicly, ABC News reported Tuesday, besides the CEOs of Amazon and Goldman Sachs. ABC News reached out to 20 Fortune 500 companies and did not get a response from the majority, and two (Microsoft and Walgreens Boots Alliance) declined to comment.
CEOs "see the risk of taking a position as exceeding the return," James O'Rourke, Norte Dame professor, told ABC News.
Axon Enterprise, which makes law enforcement tools like tasers, is an exception. Axon's CEO said the company should try to drones with stun guns to combat mass shootings, but it caused internal strife; members of its ethics board quit. The ACLU also condemned the idea, and the company said it dropped the idea this week.
The trustee of New York State Common Retirement Fund, which has money invested in Meta and Twitter, said it would vote against confirming both companies' boards to protest what he cited was content from the shooting in Buffalo and the shooter's racist manifesto going around the platforms. (The move was ineffectual.)
"This time we must actually do something," President Biden said last week.
Saia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.