The Trace Finds ‘Hope’ in Doctor’s Idea to Cripple Gun Industry

While the staff of the Bloomberg-funded anti-gun website The Trace are scratching their heads over the “paradox” of steep declines in violent crime without steep reductions in lawful gun ownership, they’re also finding and embracing new gun control proposals that would cripple the firearms industry… and by extension, our right to keep and bear arms. 

In The Trace’s look back at gun control efforts this year, the site proclaims that one of the things that gives their reporters “hope” in 2026 is a “Chicago doctor [who] has started a policy experiment that would compel gunmakers in Illinois pay into a compensation fund toward gun violence victims in order to get their state license.”

I wrote about this for our VIP members last month (and for the record, VIP, VIP Gold, and VIP Platinum memberships are currently 74% off when you use the promo code MERRY74, so now’s a great time to join), but in case you missed it, a Chicago doctor named Anthony Douglas is leading the push for a bill called “Responsibility in Firearm Legislation Act.” 

Ironically, this bill is an irresponsible piece of legislation that seeks to hold gun companies financially responsible for the actions of violent criminals; not through civil lawsuits, which have long been a favorite tool for anti-gun advocates, but through state-level licensing for firearms manufacturers. 

Illinois already requires federally licensed firearm retailers to get an Illinois license before they can operate, but the RIFL Act would impose a new licensing mandate on gun makers as well. And in order to get that license, manufacturers would have to agree to cough up money when one of hteir products is used in a crime. As The Trace describes Douglas’s plan:

Under the plan, a gun company’s annual contribution would scale with how often its firearms are recovered in fatal incidents, shootings, and suicides in Illinois. The more frequently a company’s guns are found to create public costs, the more it would pay. Hospitals could bill the new fund directly for health care costs after a firearm injury. Families could get help with lost wages, emergency relocation, child care, and transportation.

The compensation fund would also serve as a way to hold the gun industry financially accountable without litigation. Taking manufacturers to court rarely proves successful thanks to the gun industry’s broad legal immunity. For two decades, the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, has insulated gunmakers from most lawsuits over third‑party misuse of their products, meaning that the gun industry is rarely held financially responsible or forced to cover any costs, unlike other industries. The RIFL Act sidesteps that terrain by using a licensing fee to cover compensation instead of damages in court.

Supporters and the bill’s legislative sponsor say lawyers have reviewed the framework and believe it could withstand constitutional scrutiny, although they readily concede the industry would almost certainly sue. “Anything now can be argued in terms of constitutionality,” Douglas said, “but this is designed to avoid PLCAA.”

Yes, thankfully anything that impacts our right to keep and bear arms can be argued in terms of constitutionality, and Dr. Douglas’s big idea utterly fails, despite what anti-gun attorneys might claim. 

This bill isn’t just a condition and qualification on the commercial sale of arms, which the Supreme Court said in Heller are “generally permitted”. It imposes a meaningful constraint on the ability to purchase firearms. Most, if not all, gun companies would simply boycott the Illinois market altogether rather than apply for a license that holds them financially responsible for the criminal misuse of their product, and that, in turn, would make it impossible for Illinois residents to lawfully acquire a firearm. 

Douglas’s idea, just like California’s “1-in-30” gun rationing law struck down by the federal judiciary, flies in the face of the national tradition of gun ownership. As the Ninth Circuit wrote when upholding a district court decision that held the gun rationing law unconstitutional, “Bruen requires a ‘historical analogue, not a ‘historical twin,’ for a modern firearm regulation to pass muster. Here, the historical record does not even establish a historical cousin.”

The political argument is both moral and pecuniary, said Dr. Selwyn Rogers Jr., a trauma surgeon for 35 years and founding director of the University of Chicago Medicine Trauma Center. He said he has watched medicine drive down deaths from car crashes through a mix of engineering and policy mandates including seatbelts, airbags, collapsible columns, and better-designed roads.

He argued that a similar incentive shift is missing in firearms. “If there are penalties, people will make different choices,” Rogers told me. He points to technologies — biometrics or microstamping — that could make guns less likely to be used by anyone other than their owner. “We use technology to make our lives more efficient,” he said. “What about if we used the same technology and applied it to guns?”

Microstamping doesn’t make guns less likely to be used by anyone other than their rightful owner. If anything, it encourages the use of stolen guns in crime. More importantly though, it’s an easily defeated technology that can impose meaningful constraints on the possession of firearms by rendering them forever useless if, for instance, a firing pin with a unique microstamp breaks and needs to be replaced. As for biometric firearms, there’s simply not much of a market for them. 

And despite Rogers’ argument, Douglas’s proposal doesn’t provide any incentive (or arm-twisting) for gun makers to adopt things like biometric fingerprint readers or microstamping technology. It simply mandates that any company that wants to sell firearms in Illinois must agree to be held financially responsible for the criminal misuse of their products… even those that weren’t originally sold in the state of Illinois (which opens up a Commerce Clause argument in addition to the Second Amendment arguments agains the bill). 

Douglas claims that a company like Smith & Wesson would have to pay about $20 million per year to participate in the Illinois firearms market. 

“But when you put that into how much it would increase the cost per firearm for a Smith & Wesson, it would only increase each firearm they sell by about $20,” Douglas said. “The increase in the cost of a firearm is honestly modest compared to what every single taxpayer pays for firearm injury.”

Douglas is playing fast and loose with his math by assuming that Smith & Wesson would pass on the cost of their Illinois license to every gun buyer across the United States, and not just those customers in Illinois. And Douglas also ignores the fact that if every Democrat-controlled state adopted the RIFL Act, Smith & Wesson wouldn’t be paying $20 million each year. It would be more like $200 million… hardly a “modest” burden to the company or the customers who would likely end up bearing the increased cost. 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that The Trace is clinging to the hope that such a blatantly unconstitutional attack on our Second Amendment rights will become law in Illinois and lead to other blue states following suit. Nor is it shocking that Douglas’s idea has buy-in from nearly three dozen Democrats in the Illinois House. Illinois was the last state in the nation to recognize the right to carry, and only after the Seventh Circuit declared its outright ban violated the Second Amendment. The Illinois legislature continues to treat the right to keep and bear arms as a problem to be solved instead of a treasure to be protected, and the new year will bring new opportunities for anti-gunners in the Land of Lincoln to try to tread all over that fundamental civil right.

Editor’s Note: To celebrate Christmas and ring in 2026, Bearing Arms is matching our biggest sale ever on VIP memberships. Now through January 1, until 11:59 pm PT, receive 74% off a VIP membership using promo code MERRY74!