In a recent Fortune magazine interview, Levi Strauss CEO Chip Bergh urged customers to bring their wallets, but leave their self-defense handguns behind, when they visit Levi’s stores. “You don’t need a gun to try on a pair of jeans and it’s really out of respect for the safety of our employees and consumers shopping in our stores,” Bergh said.
Ironically, to justify his call for customers to give up their self-defense options, Bergh pointed to supposed “gun-free zones” where terrorists have committed mass murder with no fear of resistance: “With stores in Paris, Nice and Orlando, and the company’s European headquarters in Brussels,” Bergh wrote in an open letter on his LinkedIn page, “I’ve thought more about safety in the past year than in the previous three decades of my career because of how ‘close to home’ so many incidents with guns have come to impacting people working for this company.”
In response, many American gun owners are dumping Levi's and switching to Wrangler, which they see as a far friendlier company to firearm freedom and the safety it guarantees.
