After high-profile shootings, public scrutiny often focuses on the companies who produced and sold the guns that were used. But the Highland Park Peace Project (HP3) is focused on a different question: What about the companies that do business with them?
Founded in the wake of the July 4, 2022, mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, HP3 examines the broader network of corporations that support the companies that manufacture AR-15s and other assault weapons sold to civilians. Through its Gun Accountability Scorecard, the organization researches and tracks relationships between gun makers and the retailers, law firms, financial institutions, suppliers, and other companies it describes as industry “enablers.”
To learn more about this approach, we spoke with Daniel Perlman, a co-founder and board member of the Highland Park Peace Project. A longtime attorney, Perlman spent four decades practicing law in Chicago before retiring as a partner at Kirkland & Ellis in 2025. He serves as vice chair of the Gun Violence Prevention PAC, an Illinois-based gun safety advocacy organization, and helped launch HP3 following the mass shooting in his hometown of Highland Park.
In our conversation, Perlman discussed why HP3 focuses on corporate supply chains rather than legislation, how the organization identifies companies connected to assault weapon manufacturers, and why he believes economic pressure can be an effective tool for advancing accountability. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Tell us about the Highland Park Peace Project.
Imagine your hometown of 30,000 people shattered in moments. On the Fourth of July, a multi-generational parade was suddenly targeted by a shooter wielding a Smith & Wesson AR-15. The carnage was unbearable: seven lives stolen, 48 people wounded by bullets or shrapnel, and thousands of terrified paradegoers who ran for their lives and hid in the storage rooms of local businesses.
Now, imagine the corporate reality behind that tragedy. Just two months later, a prominent corporate law firm put its name on an SEC document legally structuring a stock incentive plan designed to help Smith & Wesson executives personally profit from the sale of those very weapons. Partners from that law firm walked the streets of our hometown — as neighbors, coaches, and fellow congregants — with their complicity unnoticed, quietly sharing in those profits through hefty legal fees.
How did these lawyers walk into the same grocery stores and restaurants as our hometown’s survivors and traumatized families? Because no one was paying attention to this corporate complicity.
The Highland Park Peace Project has ended that era of benign neglect. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation combating the gun violence epidemic through an economic lens. Assault weapon manufacturers do not operate in a vacuum; they are sustained by a vast network of “enablers” — the suppliers, financial institutions, and service providers that fuel their supply chains. That’s why we created the Gun Accountability Scorecard, a tool that empowers consumers, municipalities, and enterprises to align their spending with their values.
By utilizing the Scorecard, individuals and organizations can also identify the “heroes” — brave companies that have taken a definitive stand against the distribution of military-style weaponry to civilians. HP3 provides the educational tools and market intelligence needed to shift financial incentives away from gun profiteering and toward public safety.
Why target the broader ecosystem of companies that support the gun industry?
HP3 deliberately targets these “enablers” because gun manufacturers are heavily insulated from traditional legal accountability. Since 2005, the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) has granted gun manufacturers broad protection from civil lawsuits. This legal shield has historically emboldened manufacturers to market highly lethal weapons to civilians with minimal financial risk. Furthermore, traditional legislative routes are frequently bottlenecked by intense political lobbying.
HP3’s strategy sidesteps these legislative and litigation hurdles by focusing entirely on a vulnerability the gun industry has admitted to itself. In their annual SEC filings, major public manufacturers like Ruger and Smith & Wesson explicitly acknowledge that while PLCAA protects them in courtrooms, their operations could be severely impacted if their suppliers and service providers stopped doing business with them.1Ruger, Form 10-K, March 2, 2026, https://ruger.com/corporate/PDF/10K-2025.pdf, 13-18; Smith & Wesson, Form 10-K, April 30, 2026, https://ir.smith-wesson.com/node/18711/html#item_1a_risk_factors, 14-20.
We are responding directly to that vulnerability. The corporate ecosystem supporting these companies has long been shrouded in secrecy, even for publicly traded gun manufacturers. Uncovering this network required months of highly disciplined, unprecedented corporate forensic research. HP3 has successfully mapped this hidden supply chain, and through our Scorecard, we are finally bringing transparency to the institutions that quietly fuel the business of assault weapons. And we are about to take our Scorecard from rating 200 companies to rating over 500 companies.
You describe these “enabler” companies as being “one step away” from mass shootings. What do you mean by that?
In a mass shooting, when a gunman sprays bullets into a crowd with an AR-15, the survivors are often just one step away from the slain. We saw that in Highland Park, in Las Vegas, in Orlando, and in countless other places devastated by assault weapons. Quite literally, the difference between life and death comes down to where you stand. But pressuring the manufacturers of these weapons of war isn’t enough. They are shielded by lobbyists and legal protections, making them hard to stop through legislation and litigation. HP3 is acting by targeting the companies that do business with the gun makers — those one step away. Retailers. Lawyers. Brands that power their supply chains. By taking action against businesses that support these gun makers, we can disrupt the systems that allow mass shootings to continue.
In your view, does the gun industry rely on a degree of secrecy around these business relationships?
Absolutely. Most Americans know very little about the supply chains of assault weapon manufacturers. Many household names are part of those supply chains. We are confident that if consumers and corporate decision-makers were aware that certain companies with whom they choose to interact are helping to support the makers of assault weapons commonly used in mass shootings, they would change their behavior.
Some critics might say this approach unfairly targets businesses that aren’t directly manufacturing firearms.
Exposing this ecosystem isn’t about being unfair; it’s about transparency. By shedding light on these business connections, we give consumers, enterprises, and governmental entities the opportunity to align their marketplace spending with their core values, making corporate responsibility an economic reality.
How profitable are assault weapons to the gun industry?
In 2022, after the Uvalde and Highland Park mass shootings, the House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into the sale of AR-15-style rifles by Bushmaster, Daniel Defense, Ruger, Sig Sauer, and Smith & Wesson and found that the companies had “collected more than $1 billion over the last decade from selling military-style assault weapons to civilians, even as gun violence increased across the United States.”
More specifically, Daniel Defense’s revenue from AR-15s tripled from $40 million in 2019 to over $120 million in 2021, and Ruger’s gross earnings from AR-15s also nearly tripled over that same time period, increasing from $39 million to over $103 million.
More recent data is harder to come by because gun manufacturers keep their sales figures shrouded in secrecy. For instance, Smith & Wesson, which is a publicly traded company, groups all of its rifle and shotgun lines together into a broader “long gun” reporting category. This single bucket, which includes semi-automatic AR-15s and other assault weapons as well as more conventional manually operated rifles and shotguns, generated $116.5 million in net sales in fiscal year 2024 (with 228,000 units shipped) and $104 million the following year (with 175,000 units shipped).
While Smith & Wesson explicitly notes in its reports that “modern sporting rifles” (an industry euphemism for assault weapons) are a key component of these long gun sales, the company keeps the precise revenue breakdown of its AR-15s confidential.
HP3’s focus is on civilian assault weapon sales.
Our focus is narrow and intentional by design: shifting the market behavior of the corporate networks supporting assault weapon manufacturers — like Bushmaster, Daniel Defense, Ruger, Sig Sauer, and Smith & Wesson — that actively sell weapons of war into the civilian marketplace. We are not addressing weapons manufactured for the military or law enforcement branches. By focusing strictly on civilian sales, we target the precise intersection where corporate commerce directly feeds into the public mass shooting epidemic eroding the peace and safety of everyday life in the United States.
HP3’s strategy seems modeled in part on pressure campaigns used against other industries, like fossil fuels or tobacco. Were there other accountability movements that inspired your approach?
The early founders of HP3 are both lawyers with exposure to the private equity investment space. We took note of pension funds who set parameters on what type of companies their money could be invested in. In January 2013, the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) voted to divest from companies manufacturing firearms that were illegal to own in California. As one of the largest state pension funds in the United States, CalSTRS used its leverage to make sure that their private equity investment managers did not invest their money with gun manufacturers. After all, teachers are unfortunately the first line of defense in defending our children when a gunman enters a school wielding an AR-15. Why should their retirement money invest in the gun ecosystem?
What kinds of companies have relationships with assault weapon manufacturers that the public might not expect?
Just like other companies, gun manufacturers hire auditors and lawyers, need loans from banks, have insurance for their executives, have health care insurance plans for their employees, rent office space or utilize building companies to build office buildings and rely on information technology companies.
What makes some companies “heroes”?
These are enterprises that successfully satisfy three strict, comprehensive standards over a trailing four-year period to prove they do not profit from or enable the civilian assault weapon ecosystem:
- Supply chain, service, and technology restrictions: The enterprise (including all parents, subsidiaries, and controlled affiliates) must receive absolutely no compensation, revenue, or financial consideration from assault weapon manufacturers. This restriction explicitly cuts across all operational vectors, including the sale of manufacturing supplies, professional or operational services, financial underwriting, lending, cloud hosting, AI services, and logistics. Additionally, the company must not have manufactured, sold, marketed, or distributed any assault weapons or high-capacity magazines.
- Direct firearm distribution restrictions: The enterprise must not have sold, brokered, or distributed any firearms manufactured, branded, or licensed by any of the gun manufacturers we’ve identified.
- Tactical gear and accessory restrictions: The enterprise cannot sell, market, or distribute any tactical gear, apparel, airguns, cleaning kits, optical components, holsters, or ammunition feeding devices bearing the trademark or logo of those five manufacturers. The single, narrow exception allowed under this standard is the sale of residential gun safes.
What makes these companies “heroes” is their verifiable commitment to this criteria.
What does meaningful industry accountability actually look like?
It means moving past sentiment and building an active, free-market framework where businesses face real economic consequences for enabling the assault weapon crisis. True accountability occurs when corporate enablers decide that severing commercial ties with civilian assault weapon manufacturers is a business necessity. Our Scorecard operationalizes this by rewarding certified “heroes” with consumer traffic and institutional procurement wins, while leveraging automatic digital campaign tools to let followers register immediate reputational pressure directly with the executives of “enabler” corporations.