It's no surprise that Illinois passed gun control in 2025. They've never exactly been a pro-gun state. They only got concealed carry due to losing a court case. They didn't believe average citizens had the right to bear arms.
Since then, though, they've done all they could to limit people's rights, and where they moved in 2025 and before is important to understand the next steps for all of us.
Not because we want to follow in their footsteps, of course. They only do pro-gun stuff at the barrel of a proverbial gun.
No, their anti-gun moves are a harbinger of things to come, as Scott Witner notes at The Truth About Guns.
He starts by noting the Firearms Industry Responsibility Act, passed in 2023.
Under FIRA, firearm companies—already operating under severe marketing restrictions—can be sued for how firearms, accessories, or related products are advertised or discussed. The statute requires manufacturers to implement undefined “reasonable controls” to prevent criminal misuse, without identifying what those controls entail. Even full compliance with existing state and federal law offers no protection. Liability may attach if a judge or jury concludes that lawful conduct contributes to a condition in Illinois that “endangers the safety or health of the public.”
That standard is so broad that it effectively nullifies predictability under the law. It also raises serious First Amendment concerns by penalizing lawful speech about lawful products.
FIRA was not the endpoint. It was the foundation.
Exactly.
The standards are designed to be vague enough that they can apply them to just about any behavior they can rationalize as contributing to the problem, even if there's no evidence that they had anything to do with anything.
In fact, that's been the modus operandi for all of these anti-gun industry laws. They blame marketing, even if the criminal in question never saw the first ad. They blame sales to allegedly problematic gun stores, even if the distributor was the one who made those sales, and both of them were oblivious to the "problematic" nature of the store in question.
It's really just a way to tie up the gun industry in lawsuits for years, force them to spend money defending themselves, or to bend the knee and do whatever it is Illinois demands of them. It's not about making anyone safer because lawful sales aren't the problem and never have been.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The broader anti-gun strategy increasingly frames firearm ownership as a public health crisis, placing ideologically aligned “experts” in positions of authority to generate reports, data, and policy recommendations that justify further restrictions. Illinois has embraced that model and is now attempting to push it further.
Dr. Anthony Douglas, a resident physician at the University of Chicago Medicine Trauma Center, has been described by The Trace as the “architect of a policy experiment” aimed at forcing gun manufacturers to fund healthcare costs as a condition of doing business in the state. His proposal would tie licensing fees to how often a manufacturer’s firearms are recovered in crimes or suicides—regardless of how those firearms were obtained or used.
In The Trace’s year-end 2025 report, the proposal was highlighted as a “hopeful trajectory” for 2026.
This concept builds on Illinois’ already aggressive dealer licensing regime. In addition to federal licensing, firearm retailers must obtain state certification, complete mandatory training for all employees involved in firearm transfers, pay substantial fees ($1,200 per retail location), and comply with an extensive list of requirements.
And it should be noted that this has nothing to do with lawful sales that directly end up in criminal hands, or even criminal actions by manufacturers. It's simply a matter of making companies pay for being popular. They don't even care if the guns were originally sold in Illinois in the first place.
Glocks, for example, will likely end up on more crime scenes simply because they're the most popular handgun model in the nation. They're bound to show up more often because they're more likely to be stolen. They're more likely to be stolen because there are just plain more of them running around.
But again, it's not about right and wrong. It's about making gun companies pay for the "privilege" of selling guns in Illinois.
What we need to understand is something anti-gunners know good and well. It's not necessary to pass regulations if you can force the gun industry to do the dirty work themselves.
If they stop distributors from selling in certain neighborhoods or even certain states, then the people there will find their rights essentially limited not because of legislation that can be challenged, but because the gun companies simply won't sell them firearms.
The right to keep and bear arms is meaningless without access to arms, but if they can force the hands of gun companies to stop providing that access, particularly via legal mechanisms they created and can somehow defend as not really being Second Amendment cases and thus not under the Bruen standard, then they have made an end-around on our rights and provided other states with guidelines to do it themselves.
This is troubling, and it needs to be challenged for what it is: a filthy grab at our rights by circumventing federal law to curtail the rights of ordinary citizens.
