Texas Green Party gubernatorial candidate Delilah Barrios, a Second Amendment absolutist, has this on her platform:
A free people must have the right to bear arms. “Civil Wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not.” ― A.E. Samaan
Maybe so. I'll bet former Green, now Libertarian Cynthia McKinney, an African-American, entertains similar ideas, though I'm not hunting. Better things to do in life.
First, I reject absolutism, even on the First Amendment, where I would be closer to that. And, given the starkness of the statement, the fact that it's the ONLY statement about the 2nd Amendment or guns on her platform, her refusal to talk about gun control details (see below) and just who A.E. Samaan is (also see below), I consider this statement, and other things I've seen from her on Twitter, to qualify as Second Amendment absolutism. Also, not a word of praise or comment on the new gun control bill, weak tea as it is?
Second, contra SCOTUS post-Heller, and librul squishes like Laurence Tribe, I continue to affirm that the "corporatist" interpretation of 2A is the correct one.
Third, re "shall not be infringed" nutters, does Barrios want felons to own gunz? The mentally ill? (I take her silence on a direct Twitter question four weeks ago about red flag laws to be opposition. And, after she got butt-hurt over something else this last Sunday, and jumped into an exchange with a "Greens right or wrong" person I asked her twice more, three hours apart, for her stance on red flag laws. Crickets again.)
Here's me referencing the former convo with this tweet, after that "Greens right or wrong" person intervened:
Actually, we WERE having a dialogue here a couple of weeks ago, until I asked you directly, Delilah, your stance on red flag laws and you never answered me.
— TheRealSocraticGadfly (@real_gadfly) June 26, 2022
Then, three hours later, giving her more chance:
To check again, no comment on whether you support .... or oppose ... red flag laws? It was a legit ask 2 weeks ago, as it is today.
— TheRealSocraticGadfly (@real_gadfly) June 27, 2022
Well, there you go. And, no, Barrios, it's not "propping myself up." Gun control is a big issue to me, and your opposition to it is disconcerting. Plus, "Both Parties are Nazis" may not know this. (Or they may, and don't care, for one of several reasons.)
Fourth, is this really true?
There's several problems with the statement. One, it assumes, or seems to, that every society is slouching toward a level of dysfunctionality that will eventually reach civil war or genocide. That comes off as a determinist view of history, which I reject right there.
Second, as Rwanda shows, there can be genocides even when most the mass murderers don't have massive amounts of guns. Much of the Ottoman genocide against Armenians was done at the communal level without massive amount of guns. Yahweh's command to Saul to commit genocide on the Amalekites also shows that.
The real question is, who is A.E. Samaan? By his website, a sort of polymath, even if some of the poly is untrue.
By Goodreads quotes (page three there) someone who appears to lust for violence if citing the guillotine as the cousin of the Second Amendment. Someone who hates socialism in any form. An absolutist on the way he frames MANY actual, or purported, or fabricated, dichotomies, like the one in Barrios' quote.
His full list of Goodreads quotes, starting with page 1, is "interesting." He's also an anti-abortion absolutist, and, in a mastery of psychological projection, comes off as various types of absolutist period, all while claiming to attack absolutisms. If I had to sum him up in one phrase? "Anarcho-libertarian." (On page 2 of the quotes, he specifically identifies as libertarian.)
And, since Barrios says she supports single-payer, here's this tidbit from Samaan:
“Eugenics has always been the escape valve of single payer socialized medicine. Havelock Ellis was writing about them as one and the same prior to the fin-de-siecle. Culling out of control population growth and the economic drain of the incurably sick has always been a part of socialized medicine.”
First, note the absolutist "always." Second, eugenics in medicine has existed without single-payer. The death of King George V immediately comes to mind.
Third? "Resisting tyranny"? Anarcho-libertarianism leaves us even more subject to the tyranny of capitalism.
And, I've wasted enough time.
Man, if that's who Barrios is citing approvingly, I wouldn't touch her or him with a 10-foot pole. Or, to riff on Kinky Friedman, vote for her as dogcatcher of Utopia. This is the primary, but not the only reason when. Her playing footsie with COVID antivaxxers is another.
If Barrios doesn't like being called a "Second Amendment absolutist," it's in her power to change it. If "Greens right or wrong" flunkies don't like her being called that, it's in their power to change that, too.
And, if she doesn't like being associated with the full range of opinions of A.E. Samaan, it's also in her power to change on that.
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