Illinios Licensing Proposal for Gun Manufacturers Is Absolutely Bonkers

Usually, when you see a terrible idea on gun laws, it’s coming from California. It’s the land of bad ideas in pretty much every avenue you care to name, after all, so it’s not anything new.

However, they don’t exclusively come from there. New York and New Jersey, for example, are in the running, and Illinois isn’t exactly a bastion of intelligent thinking when it comes to the Second Amendment.

And the latest proposal from the Land of Lincoln is possibly the most bonkers one I’ve heard in a while. It doesn’t target regular folks directly, surprisingly enough, but that doesn’t make it any better.

An Illinois bill proposes a novel approach to gun regulation and gun violence prevention.

The Responsibility in Firearm Legislation (RIFL) Act, if passed, would subject firearm manufacturers to a variable licensing fee: The more often their guns are found to have been used in injury-causing incidents, the higher their fee. The money would go toward compensating gun violence victims or to cover other costs associated with gun violence.

The bill aims to skirt federal protections for the firearm industry. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act shields sellers from most civil lawsuits over unlawful use of their products. So the RIFL Act aims to compel these companies to financially compensate gun violence victims outside the court system.

“This is designed to avoid [the federal immunity law],” Dr. Anthony Douglas, a medical resident at the University of Chicago Medicine Trauma Center and the architect of the bill, told The Trace.

The bill “really is the first of its kind,” says Jennifer Dineen, associate director of University of Connecticut’s Center for Advancing Research, Methods, and Scholarship (ARMS) in Gun Violence Prevention, and member of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium.

If the law passes, manufacturers would be unable to operate in Illinois without obtaining the to-be-created state license, and retailers could only sell Illinois consumers guns from licensed manufacturers. This would be enforced with hefty fines for violations — manufacturers could face up to $1 million in fines per month.

That’s right, they want to create a licensing scheme where the cost of the license–one required if they want to operate in the state in any way, shape, or form–is based on the actions of third parties, most of whom aren’t buying guns lawfully from anyone, much less the manufacturers themselves.

In other words, Glock would be forced to pay for every incident where some gang-banger uses one of the guns they made, one stolen from some dude in New Mexico or elsewhere, and trafficked into Chicago to be used for such purposes in violation of every law on the books. They’d be forced to pay for cases where they sold a gun in accordance with every regulation out there, but then the gun was sold, then resold, then resold, before someone uses it illegally.

And oh-so-many other scenarios.

Imagine the reaction if someone tried to do this for cars based on DUI injuries, or literally anything else. Imagine if a cutler had to deal with this because knives get misused.

It’s absolutely insane that anyone can see this and think it’s a good idea.

There’s nothing remotely right about this, but it’s telling. It tells us that they can’t wrap their heads around the fact that the problem isn’t the guns, but certain people. They’re trying to make it so gun manufacturers will eventually abandon the state, thus preventing anyone from being able to buy a firearm, and do so without a gun ban at all.

Attacking the supply of firearms may not be targeting people directly, but it’s still an infringement on people’s right to keep and bear arms. If they can’t get guns, they can’t keep and bear them.

It’s as simple as that.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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