They’ve marched in protests. They’ve talked to their lawmakers. They’ve gone to Washington.
And so they’ve watched with horror as mass shootings have occurred time and again throughout the U.S., together with of their hometown.
Now a gaggle of Highland Park volunteers, fed up with easy accessibility to assault rifles just like the one used within the July 4, 2022, parade capturing, are focusing on the provision chains of firms that produce the military-grade weapons so usually utilized in such assaults.
The founders of the Highland Park Peace Venture aren’t simply going after Smith & Wesson, Sig Sauer and different gunmakers.
As an alternative, they’re aiming for the underside traces of firms that do enterprise with them, compiling a public database of dozens of regulation corporations, banks, retailers and extra, and branding them as “enablers” of violence or “heroes” of their motion — and inspiring customers to spend accordingly.
“We’re coming at it from an angle that’s capitalism-based, fairly than ready round for legislative motion,” stated Highland Park Peace Venture co-founder Stephanie Jacobs, who narrowly escaped the parade capturing herself.
“By taking motion in opposition to these companies, it’s our hope that we will disrupt the system that permits these mass shootings to proceed,” co-founder Daniel Perlman stated.
Jacobs, a company lawyer and lifelong Highland Park resident, was first spurred to motion as a gun violence prevention advocate within the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary Faculty capturing that left 26 individuals useless in 2012.
However whereas serving as a board member of a number of violence prevention teams and lobbying members of Congress, Jacobs stored working into acquainted partitions.
“The legislative course of is hamstrung,” Jacobs stated of the nation’s lack of reform of gun legal guidelines.
So she was devastated, “however not shocked” when three years in the past she realized it was gunfire and never a marching band’s drummers making the popping noises that began panic in downtown Highland Park on Independence Day.
Shortly earlier than the parade, different relations had beckoned Jacobs and her husband to a special spot throughout the road. “Had we gone to the place we have been initially supposed to sit down, that’s the place most of the victims have been,” she stated.
They have been in a position to run right into a retailer and away from the violence, “however the trauma that we skilled, that so a lot of my youngsters’ pals skilled and nonetheless to this present day expertise, is actual,” Jacobs stated. “We’re only one neighborhood of 1000’s on this nation that experiences issues like this, whether or not it’s at a faculty or a bowling alley or a parade.”
The capturing was the foremost impetus towards Illinois’ assault weapons ban signed into regulation by Gov. JB Pritzker in January 2023.
At an occasion celebrating the ban quickly afterward, Jacobs met Perlman, one other Highland Park lawyer who shared the thought he’d been batting round after observing public pension fund leaders pressuring non-public fairness traders to divest from gunmakers.
“A few of them have stated to the sponsors, ‘If you happen to’re going to put money into the producers of weapons, then we want an opt-out clause,’” Perlman stated.
They determined to attempt to deliver the identical strain from customers at massive to the businesses doing enterprise with assault weapon producers: publicly disgrace those who do, and endorse those who don’t.
Jacobs, Perlman and their tight-knit group of volunteers with the nonprofit Highland Park Peace Venture launched their on-line database earlier this summer season, with a “scorecard” system supposed to tell customers which of them they contemplate gun violence “enablers,” and people they hail as “heroes.”
Their web site, hppeaceproject.org, grades the worldwide chemical firm Celanese Inc. as an “enabler” for holding “a trademark for the polymer Zytel which is offered to Smith & Wesson for use of their manufacturing course of.” TD Financial institution Group and TD Securities get the identical grade for serving as lenders to Smith & Wesson.
Amongst others, the volunteer group additionally calls out Bass Professional Outlets for promoting a number of fashions of semiautomatic lengthy rifles, in addition to Mastercard, which it notes is an “acceptable type of cost to be used in buying assault weapons direct to client.”
A TD spokesperson declined to remark. Representatives for the opposite alleged “enablers” didn’t reply to requests for remark.
The Highland Park Peace Venture positively highlights firms like Salesforce for its “publicly said coverage prohibiting its merchandise for use to promote or promote assault weapons,” and Costco for protecting “any merchandise made by main assault weapons producers” off their cabinets.
Small choices, like deciding to buy at Costco fairly than Walmart — which the Peace Venture labels an “enabler” for promoting weapons on-line — may finally add as much as make such gross sales a dropping enterprise proposition, the volunteers say.
“We’re asking each neighborhood and each decision-maker, each enterprise, group, governmental entity, to make a distinction with us,” Perlman stated. “Proper now we’re just one step away from making a change, and that’s getting people engaged.”
