Many years ago, Otis McDonald, a 76-year old retiree living in a high-crime area of Chicago testified that he had “been robbed numerous times in his Morgan Park home; [he’d] witnessed too many crimes to count and …been threatened with pistols around his home.” The gangbangers and drug dealers had “taken over” his neighborhood, and he wanted to keep a handgun in his own home to protect himself, something that Chicago law at the time prohibited. Mr. McDonald was the named plaintiff in McDonald v. City of Chicago, the landmark challenge to the handgun ban, and his experiences helped persuade the United States Supreme Court to overturn the law as a violation of the Second Amendment. The Court dismissed Chicago’s and other municipalities’ arguments as “at war with our central holding in Heller: that the Second Amendment protects a personal right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, most notably for self-defense within the home.”
A University of Chicago trauma doctor, testifying before the Illinois House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, is seeking to turn back the clock. Responding to concerns over pricing lower-income gun buyers out of the market, Dr. Anthony D. Douglas declared that “to the point about pricing poor people out of owning firearms, I think poor people don’t benefit from owning firearms.” This “concern about poor people being able to, are benefit from owning firearms or being put out of being able to afford firearms is, I think, we are a little bit distracted from what poor people and poor communities actually need.”
Dr. Douglas is “the mastermind behind HB3320/ SB2279,” the Responsibility in Firearm Legislation (RIFL) Act. This 122-page legislation would, if passed, require firearm manufacturers in Illinois to obtain a RIFL license, and distribute license fees proceeds to “victims of firearms” (“firearm injury” means any gun-related injury, suicide or homicide). License fees would be set at an amount estimated to be “equal to the public health costs and financial burdens borne by the State and its residents as a result of firearm injuries,” using the incidence of firearm injuries in the previous year; however, in the first year the total annual aggregate fee would be capped at $866,000,000. Each licensee would be required to pay the portion of the total annual aggregate fee equal to the market share of the firearm manufacturer. A program established under the law would compensate “victims of firearms” for all direct costs incurred as a result of firearm injury for up to three years post-event, which payments would be tax-exempt. Anyone suffering a firearm injury (including out-of-state residents), their next of kin, legal guardian, dependent, first-degree relative, second-degree relative, and employer could qualify as “eligible victims.”
License fees, in reality a “punishment tax,” would add at least $1,600 to the cost of each firearm sold in the state, according to a lobbyist for the Illinois State Rifle Association. Guns for self-defense or subsistence hunting would become unaffordable luxuries for the poor and eventually, for just about everyone, once the legislation destroys the Second Amendment in Illinois.
Dr. Douglas and other bill supporters argue that the gun industry should “pay for the bloodshed it helps to create” by shifting “the direct costs away from taxpayers and place[] them where they belong: on the gun industry.” Manufacturers would “pay according to how frequently their products are recovered in injuries and deaths in Illinois. If their products are never recovered, they pay nothing…The logic that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ is passé.”
Besides driving up prices, and creating new fees and bureaucracy, the bills seek to override the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which protects the heavily-regulated gun industry from liability for a third party’s criminal misuse of their products. The legislation also ignores the pesky logical issue that violent crime is, in fact, the product of gangs and criminals and enabled by soft-on-crime public officials advocating “non-punitive” justice, all of which have nothing to do with the gun industry and none of whom will share the financial burden imposed by the RIFL Act.
An inconvenient truth at odds with Dr. Douglas’s narrative is that Chicago’s poor and minorities, in common with those throughout America, remain the most at risk of crime and violence and therefore have, if anything, an even more pressing need for the tools of self-defense than most. The Illinois Policy Institute, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research organization, notes that minority communities in the city’s South Side and West Side face poverty rates “of nearly three times the citywide average,” and an analysis shows, further, that “low-income areas of the city and Black and Hispanic Chicagoans are much more likely to experience crime.”
Meanwhile, a prompt police response isn’t guaranteed in Chicago. A mother who called 911 after two masked men broke into her home reportedly had to wait over four hours for police to arrive; in the meantime, a supervisor suggested being her own first responder. As the woman recounted to a local media outlet, he “asked me if I would consider defending myself …if I had a weapon or considered getting one.”
While Illinois lawmakers mull over the ill-conceived RIFL bills, at least one, thankfully, has called out the major flaw in the legislation. State Rep. Patrick Windhorst, R-Harrisburg, condemned Dr. Douglas’s statements on the poor as elitist – “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.”
One thing the city’s gun and crime control policies are not delivering for Chicago’s most vulnerable residents is reliable protection. And hearing from yet another credentialed gun control advocate (one insulated from the problems they face every day) that less access to the tools of self-defense will somehow make their lives better will surely ring hollow to many of them.
As Otis McDonald told a reporter at the Chicago Sun Times: “If this handgun ban was working, I would say, 'OK, no problem,' even though it's against my constitutional rights. But it's not working.”
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