University of Chicago’s Dr. Anthony Douglas — architect of Illinois’ firearms tax scheme — told a legislative hearing that “poor people don’t benefit from owning firearms.” In a city where half of 911 emergency calls go unanswered, that’s not public health policy. It’s sanctioned helplessness.
Dr. Anthony Douglas, a University of Chicago trauma resident and the brains behind Illinois’ Responsibility in Firearm Legislation (RIFL) Act, showed up at a legislative hearing last week and said the quiet part out loud.
“I think poor people don’t benefit from owning firearms,” he told the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force. “I think more people benefit from access to education, access to resources.”
That’s a direct quote. From a man whose legislative baby — House Bill 3320 — would pile thousands of dollars in new taxes onto a single firearm purchase. Opponents say the bill would effectively price working-class and low-income Illinoisans out of exercising a constitutional right. Douglas thinks that’s a feature, not a bug.
Let’s be clear about what’s actually being argued here. A physician employed by one of the wealthiest institutions in Illinois, working in one of the most violent cities in America, went on the record to say that the people most likely to be victims of violent crime — who are disproportionately poor, disproportionately Black and Brown, and disproportionately living in neighborhoods the Chicago Police Department cannot or will not patrol — shouldn’t be trusted with the tools to defend themselves.
Instead, they should have “education and resources.” Meaning: more taxpayer money funneled to the same NGO archipelago that’s been promising to end “gun violence” for decades while the body count keeps climbing.
Republican State Rep. Patrick Windhorst of Harrisburg didn’t let it pass. “The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States guarantees [self-defense] to them,” Windhorst told the committee. “And it’s really not our place to say, ‘well, we think you’re better off not having this thing,’ which is the tone of this committee.”
Exactly right. But let’s go further — because Douglas’s argument doesn’t just fail constitutionally. It collapses the second you look at the actual city he works in.
The 50/50 coin flip
Here’s the world Dr. Douglas wants Chicago’s poor to live in, according to his own city’s data.
When a Chicagoan dials 911 for a Priority 1 or Priority 2 emergency — that’s the Chicago Police Department’s own designation for calls involving “imminent threat to life, bodily injury, or major property damage” — there’s roughly a coin-flip chance that no officers will be available to respond.
That’s not hyperbole. That’s Wirepoints’ exhaustive FOIA analysis of records pulled directly from the Chicago Police Department and the city’s own Office of the Inspector General.
The trajectory is damning:
- 2019 (pre-pandemic, pre-Floyd riots): 19% of high-priority 911 calls had no officers available.
- 2021: 52% — 406,829 emergencies where dispatchers had literally zero cops to send.
- 2022: roughly 60%.
- 2023: 225,000-plus high-priority calls went unanswered through just part of the year.
- 2024: still a 50/50 proposition — 127,000 out of 256,000 urgent calls went unstaffed through mid-May.
We’re talking shots fired. Person shot. Assault in progress. Armed robbery. Domestic battery. In more than half of those calls in 2022, nobody came.
Wirepoints has documented thousands of these incidents — 911 callers told to shelter in place while the system collapsed around them. Entire shifts passing in some districts with zero proactive patrol time because every available officer was already buried in backlogs that could run 30 minutes, an hour, four hours. The department’s own inspector general has admitted CPD can’t even reliably log when officers finally do arrive for huge swaths of emergency calls.
That is the real, lived experience for the poor and working-class residents Dr. Douglas claims don’t “benefit” from owning a firearm.
Who actually benefits from a $1,000 handgun tax?
Douglas’s preferred policy — punitive, price-driven gun control — doesn’t disarm the gangbangers shooting up Englewood and Austin. It never has. It never will. Those guns are already illegal. They were stolen, straw-purchased, or trafficked across state lines, and they’re in criminal hands regardless of what tax Springfield slaps on Glocks sold through federally licensed dealers.
What a prohibitive tax scheme does accomplish is making legal, lawful gun ownership a luxury good. A right that exists on paper for everyone but in practice only for those who can absorb a few hundred or few thousand dollars in added “fees” on top of the price of the firearm itself.
Who can afford that? Doctors. Lawyers. Tenured professors. University of Chicago surgical residents. The exact demographic that lives in neighborhoods where 911 response times still mean something, and where private security patrols fill in the gaps the city won’t.
Who can’t afford it? The single mother on the South Side who needs to make it from her car to her apartment door after a third-shift job. The convenience store clerk on a night shift in Austin. The elderly homeowner in Lawndale who watched his neighborhood get worse every year for the last decade.
Illinois has been running this playbook for years — drive up compliance costs on manufacturers and dealers, pile on fees, tax the industry into oblivion, and let the inevitable trickle-down pricing do the disarming that an outright ban couldn’t get past the courts. Cook County’s unconstitutional gun and ammo tax — which the Illinois Supreme Court struck down and which county officials are still collecting anyway — is the proof of concept.
RIFL is the next evolution. And Dr. Douglas just told us, on the record, exactly what it’s for.
The Windhorst principle
Rep. Windhorst’s rebuke deserves to be quoted again, because it cuts to the heart of what’s wrong with Douglas’s worldview: “It’s really not our place to say, ‘well, we think you’re better off not having this thing.’”
That’s the whole ballgame. A right isn’t a right if a committee of elites gets to decide who’s worthy of exercising it. The Second Amendment doesn’t come with an income requirement. It doesn’t come with a “you must be this credentialed to defend your family” sign. And it sure as hell doesn’t come with a carve-out letting University of Chicago physicians decide which Americans have earned the privilege of not being murdered on the walk home.
Dr. Douglas stares at gunshot victims on gurneys every shift. That should, in theory, give him insight. Instead, it’s apparently given him contempt — for the victims, not the perpetrators. His prescription isn’t to demand that Chicago fix the catastrophic failure of its 911 system. It isn’t to call for prosecutors who actually prosecute violent offenders, or judges who actually hold them. It’s to disarm the victims.
Spare us. The poor in Chicago aren’t debating “resources” in faculty lounges. They’re barricading doors and praying they make it home from work. They deserve the same right to armed self-defense Dr. Douglas takes for granted from the comfort of his Hyde Park bubble.
In the real Chicago — the one where cops can’t come half the time because leadership broke the department, and the courts won’t hold criminals because the SAFE-T Act broke prosecution — that right isn’t a luxury. It’s survival.
Dr. Douglas thinks poor people don’t benefit from owning firearms. Ask the Wicker Park woman Wirepoints profiled — the one who watched two masked men walk into her home while she was waiting for police who never came. Ask her whether she’d rather have had “access to resources” or a loaded handgun in her nightstand.
Then ask yourself which one of those things the good doctor’s bill would take off the table.
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