The Highland Park Peace Project, or HP3, runs an expanding online database that files hundreds of businesses under “heroes” or “enablers,” a grade that turns on whether a firm deals with the five firearm manufacturers that build the rifles the group calls assault weapons. Those five are Smith & Wesson, Sturm, Ruger & Co., Bushmaster, Daniel Defense, and SIG Sauer. The “enablers” it singles out extend well past firearms dealers to online retailers such as Amazon, plus banks, accountants, and law firms that supply, resell for, or contract with the named brands.
Daniel Perlman, an HP3 co-founder, was present at the July 4, 2022, Highland Park parade when a gunman killed seven people and wounded dozens more. His private equity career shaped the strategy, which borrows from how some public pension funds pull money out of holdings they consider “socially or morally at odds with their organization.”
From Gun Makers to Banks, Lawyers and Retailers
Perlman told the Chicago Tribune, “It has created transparency; what we’ve created has now allowed corporations and consumers to ask for accountability.” Each listing, he says, gets checked against bankruptcy records, court documents, and annual reports, and every targeted company receives a letter first, giving it a chance to challenge the classification. Businesses that walk away from the manufacturers, Salesforce and REI among them, collect the “hero” designation.
By Perlman’s telling to the Chicago Tribune, the point is not to demonize but to choke off the “millions of dollars into the pockets” of companies arming civilians with assault weapons. He calls the database “apolitical” and stresses that HP3 stays out of legislative battles, aiming instead to “change behavior.” That posture of neutrality is precisely where gun rights supporters balk, since the enterprise operates inside a fiercely political dispute and uses economic pressure against lawful companies that manufacture and sell arms protected by the Second Amendment.
HP3 Calls Its Economic Pressure Campaign “Apolitical”
Nearby critics have not minced words. Michael Danforth, a Republican on the Lake County Board whose career spans weapons importing and firearms law, branded the campaign “misguided” and fueled by “hatred for gun manufacturers.” The database, Danforth told the Tribune, swings a “broad brush” and pins guilt on the wrong shoulders, since treating a company as “somehow a bad guy … that’s just foolishness.” In his words, “They may mean well at the end of the day, but they’re attacking the wrong people.” He also refused the ethical premise driving the whole effort. “These companies made firearms, made tools, that somebody went out with criminal intent and killed someone with … that’s not the manufacturer’s fault,” he said, urging that as Americans recall horrors like Highland Park, Uvalde, and Littleton, “we should honor their memory, but we shouldn’t blame the manufacturers.”
The pushback reaches well past Lake County. Colion Noir, one of the Second Amendment movement’s best-known commentators, fired back with a rebuttal, casting the method as weaponized shame against our constitutional rights. Noir ridiculed how far the list reaches, noting it can sweep in a company for an act as ordinary as “delivering pizza to a warehouse.”
Supreme Court Rifle-Ban Cases Raise the Stakes
The timing is what makes it bite, given Perlman’s own concession that the database serves as a backstop should the courts rule against his side. He has warned that today’s Supreme Court would likely toss an assault weapons ban that reached its docket, and the calendar supports him. On June 30, 2026 the justices agreed to hear challenges to Cook County’s ban and a comparable Connecticut statute, with argument likely in the fall, an outcome that could dismantle the statewide Illinois ban.
A Seventh Circuit panel upheld the Illinois assault weapons ban on July 9, 2026 in a 2-1 decision in Barnett v. Raoul. A Trump-appointed judge writing the majority opinion concluding the law is “consistent with the principles that underpin our Nation’s tradition of firearm regulation” — yet the Supreme Court, which granted certiorari on June 30, 2026 in two related cases. The Supreme Court’s eventual decision in Viramontes and Grant could overturn or substantially undermine the Seventh Circuit’s reasoning.
There sits the real worry. Should the courts confirm the right to own these rifles, HP3 intends to poison the commercial waters around them, using fear of exposure to accomplish what neither lawmakers nor lawsuits can guarantee. A privately run database that brands routine business dealings as a share in bloodshed is no neutral scorecard. It signals where the next battle over gun rights will be waged.
En Banc Third Circuit Strikes Down New Jersey’s Semi-Automatic Rifle and Magazine Bans
About José Niño
José Niño is a freelance writer based in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can contact him via Facebook and X/Twitter. Subscribe to his Substack newsletter by visiting “Jose Nino Unfiltered” on Substack.com.
Desperate people will do desperate things.
“… the five firearm manufacturers that build the rifles the group calls assault weapons.”
They think only five manufacturers built the estimated 20 million AR15 platform rifles in civilian hands?
Wow!
I think there might have been more than that but as W. C. Fields said:”Never smarten up a chump.”