Dr. Anthony Douglas, the smug University of Chicago trauma resident and arrogant mastermind behind Illinois’ Responsibility in Firearms Legislation (RIFL) Act, stepped up in a legislative hearing last week and belched up a heaping helping of elitist bile blended with a soupçon clinical detachment: “I think poor people don’t benefit from owning firearms,” he pronounced.
What the little people need, the good doctor says, is more “education and resources.” Translation: more tax dollars funneled to “non-profits” with little to no return on the taxpayers’ investment.
Besides, the physician and gun-control researcher claims it isn’t good guys or gals with guns who stop evil predators…all evidence to the contrary. As such, it really should be harder for the poors to get their hands on firearms to defend themselves and their families.
His solution, then, is pricing guns out of reach of law-abiding, responsible citizens who lack bodyguards, private security details, or live in gated enclaves. In Murder City, USA—Chicago—where gang thugs roam free, that’s not social policy, that’s sadistic malpractice.
Was this clown high? Does he have a full punchcard at the local dispensary? Because this delusional drivel sounds like it was baked in a dorm room cloud of weed.
Let’s drag his elitist fantasy out into the reality that is Chicago, the city that’s been mercilessly documented by Wirepoints.org through FOIA records from the Chicago Police Department itself.
High-priority 911 calls—Priority Level 1 and 2, the ones defined as “imminent threat to life, bodily injury, or major property damage”—are the exact emergencies Chicagoans face every day: shots fired, person shot, assault in progress, armed robbery, domestic battery. In 2019, before the progressive crime wave fully metastasized, 19% of those urgent calls had “no officers available” for immediate response.
By 2021, Wirepoints found that number had exploded to 52%—406,829 high-priority incidents in which dispatchers literally had zero cops to send. In 2022 it hit roughly 60%.
Through all of 2023, 56% of high-priority calls—437,000 of them—sat in backlog with no units available. Even in 2024, through mid-May, getting a response was still a coin-flip 50%: 127,000 out of 256,000 urgent calls in which nobody came.
That’s not “delayed,” that’s “we have no police available to send to you.”
Wirepoints documented thousands of “assaults in progress,” “batteries in progress,” “person with a gun,” and “shots fired” calls where callers were told to shelter in place while the city’s response system collapsed. In some districts, entire shifts passed with zero proactive patrol time because every available cop was already buried in backlogs that stretched 30 minutes, an hour, sometimes as long as four hours. Chicago’s own inspector general has long since confirmed the department can’t even log arrival times for huge chunks of emergency calls.
So Dr. Douglas’s prescription isn’t compassion, it’s pure, venomous elitist contempt. He (allegedly) stares at blood-soaked gurneys every shift, but still demands that we disarm the victims instead of the criminals—or fix the catastrophic policies that left over half of emergency calls with “no units available.” He wants to tax gun makers into oblivion so that self-defense becomes a rich man’s luxury that only hypocrites like him can afford.
Spare us the sanctimonious impacted fecal matter, Doctor. The poor in Chicago aren’t sipping lattes in faculty lounges debating “resources.” They’re barricading their doors and praying they make it to and from work safely and survive day to day while the failed system in which you have so much faith leaves them twisting in the wind.
They have and need the same constitutional right to armed self-defense that you take for granted from the comfort of your bubble. In the real Chicago, where cops aren’t available to show up half the time, that arrogance and contempt leaves innocent people to be victimized and slaughtered.
The Center Square has the full testimony. Read it and seethe . . .
A proposed bill gun owners say will price lower income buyers out of the market continues to get attention at the Illinois state capitol.
Opponents of House Bill 3320 estimate the Responsibility in Firearms Legislation, or RIFL Act could tack on thousands of dollars in taxes to one firearm purchase, and that would price lower income people out of exercising their Second Amendment rights.
Advocates for the bill, like Dr. Anthony Douglas, said there’d be minimal added cost.
“I think poor people don’t benefit from owning firearms,” Douglas said during a House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force subject matter hearing of the bill Wednesday. “I think more people benefit from access to education, access to resources.”
State Rep. Patrick Windhorst, R-Harrisburg, said that’s an elitist opinion and people of lesser means want to be able to protect themselves.
“The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States guarantees that to them,” Windhorst said. “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.”