Harmon's bill reads like the Chicago handgun ban was overturned by SCOTUS in McDonald 2010, so I'll use outrageous licensing fees to tax our way to a defacto prohibition state.
The Activism forum has a thread with a description of the bill, but that thread is for Illinois activists actually doing something about it. No venting there please.
My take on all this:
[sarcasm] Maybe Illinois firearms manufacturers like Springfield Armory and Rock River Arms want to be allowed to operate in Gun Free Zone Illinois as an advertising gimmick, like Jack Daniel's Distillery in Alcohol-Free Moore County, Tennessee, which has local option prohibition. [/sarcasm]
Realistically, the manufacturers may be carving out an exemption just-in-case the bill should pass.
It is a bill, not an act, yet, maybe never but not now. This could end up like Bloomberg's carry permit riciprocacy fiasco in Virginia. That over-reach hurt the anti-gun movement.
SA's and RRA's goal may be to protect their business and the jobs of their employees come-what-may. I do not think it is wise to trash SA or RRA for employing pre-emptive tactics. (For full disclosure I own an M6 Scout sold by SA but have no other ponies in this race.) Rest assured, when the bill fails, the gun makers will be blamed for undermining it behind the scenes and catch heat from the other side. Question: are Illinois gun dealers organized and what are they doing?
This bill does illustrate that the power to tax gives the power to destroy that which you cannot constitutionally prohibit. That was FDR's Attorney General Homer Cummings' reasoning behind the NFA $200 registration tax on so-called "gangster weapons": he recognized you could not prohibit firearms under the Second Amendment, but the government had the power to tax into submission. Ignoring constitutional limits, D.C. and Chicago outright banned private handguns, leading to the Heller 2008 and McDonald 2010 Supreme Court rulings overturning their handgun bans. So now Chicago and D.C. are using prohibitive "regulation" as a substitute for bans. After all, reasonable regulation to prohibitionists is prohibitive regulation: training requirements including range time to own a handgun in Chicago but firing ranges open to the public are zoned out of possible existence.