CONTENTS
Introduction: Gun Love
Chapter 1: Historical Context
Chapter 2: Savage War
Chapter 3: Slave Patrols
Chapter 4: Confederate Guerrillas to Outlaw Icons
Chapter 5: Myth of the Hunter
Chapter 6: The Second Amendment as a Covenant
Chapter 7: Mass Shootings
Chapter 8. White Nationalists, the Militia Movement, and Tea Party
Patriots
Chapter 9: Eluding and Resisting the Historical White Supremacy of
the Second Amendment
Conclusion: History is Not Past
Notes
Index
About the Author
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of many books, including her acclaimed An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. She is the recipient of the Cultural Freedom Prize for Lifetime Achievement by the Lannan Foundation, and she lives in San Francisco, CA.
"Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrates that the violence sanctioned by the
Second Amendment was a key factor in transforming America into a
'militaristic-capitalist' powerhouse. . . . Dunbar-Ortiz's
unhealthy relationship with guns ended after about two years.
America’s has lasted a lot longer, but in the wake of Stoneman
Douglas, there might be reason, at last, for some very cautious
optimism."--Kevin Canfield, San Francisco Chronicle "There's a new
book that just came out that lays out a provocative argument for
getting rid of the Second Amendment in its entirety, and the book
asserts that the NRA has become a white nationalist
organization."--Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept "Dunbar-Ortiz's
subtle deconstructions of the various works which contributed to
our misunderstandings of the Second Amendment’s roots are vitally
required reading, especially in our current era of daily mass
shootings and political inaction toward better gun control. The
white supremacy that Dunbar-Ortiz exposes with surgical exactness
is the true foundation of the America we know today."—Sezin
Koehler, Wear Your Voice Magazine
"Loaded recognizes the central truth about our 'gun
culture': that the privileged place of guns in American law and
society is the by-product of the racial and class violence that has
marked our history from its beginnings."—Richard Slotkin, author of
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century
America "From an eminent scholar comes this timely and urgent
intervention on U.S. gun culture. Loaded is a high-impact assault
on the idea that Second Amendment rights were ever intended for all
Americans. A timely antidote to our national amnesia about the
white supremacist and settler colonialist roots of the Second
Amendment."—Caroline Light, author of Stand Your Ground: A History
of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense "Loaded unleashes
a sweeping and unsettling history of gun laws in the United States,
beginning with anti-Native militias and anti-Black slave patrols.
From the roots of white men armed to forge the settler state, the
Second Amendment evolved as a tool for protecting white, male
property owners. It's a must read for anyone who wants to uncover
the long fetch of contemporary Second Amendment battles."—Kelly
Lytle Hernandez, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise
of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 "Now, in Loaded, she
widens her lens to propose that the addiction to violence
characteristic of American domestic institutions also derives from
the frontiersman's belief in solving problems by killing. Whether
expressed in individual cruelty like the collection of scalps or
group barbarism by settler colonialists calling themselves
'militias,' violence has become an ever-widening theme of life in
the United States."—Staughton Lynd, author of Class Conflict,
Slavery, and the United States Constitution "For anyone who
believes we need more than 'thoughts and prayers' to address our
national gun crisis, Loaded is required reading. Beyond the Second
Amendment, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz presents essential arguments
missing from public debate. She forces readers to confront hard
truths about the history of gun ownership, linking it to ongoing
structures of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and racial
capitalism. These are the open secrets of North American history.
It is our anxious denial as much as our public policies that
perpetrate violence. Only by coming to peace with our history can
we ever be at peace with ourselves. This, for me, is the great
lesson of Loaded."—Christina Heatherton, co-editor of Policing the
Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter "Roxanne
Dunbar-Oritz's Loaded argues U.S. history is quintessential gun
history, and gun history is a history of racial terror and
genocide. In other words, gun culture has never been about hunting.
From crushing slave rebellions to Indigenous resistance, arming
individual white settler men has always been the strategy for
maintaining racial and class rule and for taking Indigenous land
from the founding of the settler nation to the present. With
clarity and urgency, Dunbar-Ortiz asks us not to think of our
current moment as an exceptional era of mass-shootings. Instead,
the very essence of the Second Amendment and the very project of
U.S. 'settler democracy' has required immense violence that began
with Indigenous genocide and has expanded to endless war-making
across the globe. This is a must read for any student of U.S.
history."—Nick Estes, author of the forthcoming book Our History is
the Future: Mni Wiconi and Native Liberation "With her usual
unassailable rigor for detail and deep perspective, Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz has potentially changed the debate about gun control
in the United States. She meticulously and convincingly argues that
U.S. gun culture—and the domestic and global massacres that have
flowed from it—must be linked to an understanding of the
ideological, historical, and practical role of guns in seizing
Native American lands, black enslavement, and global imperialism.
This is an essential work for policy-makers, street activists, and
educators who are concerned with Second Amendment debates,
#blacklivematters campaigns, global peace, and community-based
security."—Clarence Lusane, Chairman and Professor of Political
Science at Howard University and author of The Black History of the
White House "Just what did the founding fathers intend the Second
Amendment to do? Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's answer to that question
will unsettle liberal gun control advocates and open-carry
aficionados alike. She follows the bloodstains of today's mass
shootings back to the slave patrols and Indian Wars. There are no
easy answers here, just the tough reckoning with history needed to
navigate ourselves away from a future filled with more
tragedies."—James Tracy, co-author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban
Race Rebels and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times
"Gun violence, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz compellingly shows, is as U.S.
American as apple pie. This important book peels back the painful
and bloody layers of gun culture in the United States, and exposes
their deep roots in the killing and dispossession of Native
peoples, slavery and its aftermath, and U.S. empire-making. They
are roots with which all who are concerned with matters of justice,
basic decency, and the enduring tragedy of the U.S. love affair
with guns must grapple."—Joseph Nevins, author of Dying to Live: A
Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid "Loaded is
a masterful synthesis of the historical origins of violence and
militarism in the US. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reminds us of what we've
chosen to forget at our own peril: that from mass shootings to the
routine deployment of violence against civilians by the US
military, American violence flows from the normalization of
racialized violence in our country's founding history."—Johanna
Fernández, Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College of the
City University, and author of the forthcoming book, When the World
Was Their Stage: A History of the Young Lords Party, 1968–1976
"More than a history of the Second Amendment, this is a powerful
history of the forging of white nationalism and empire through
racist and naked violence. Explosively, it also shows how even
liberal—and some leftist—pop culture icons have been complicit in
the myth-making that has shrouded this potent historical
truth."—Gerarld Horne, author of The Counter Revolution of 1776:
Slave Resistance and the Origins of the USA "Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
has done an outstanding job of resituating the so-called gun debate
into the context of race and settler colonialism. The result is
that the discussion about individual gun ownership is no longer
viewed as an abstract moral question and instead understood as
standing at the very foundation of U.S. capitalism. My attention
was captured from the first page."—Bill Fletcher, Jr., former
president of TransAfrica Forum and syndicated writer "Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz provides a brilliant decolonization of the Second
Amendment of the United States Constitution. She describes how the
'savage wars' against Indigenous Peoples, slave patrols (which
policing in the U.S. originates from), today's mass shootings, and
the rise in white Nationalism are connected to the Second
Amendment. This is a critically important work for all social
science disciplines."—Michael Yellow Bird, professor and director
of Tribal and Indigenous Peoples Studies at North Dakota State
University "This explosive, ground-breaking book dispels the
confusion and shatters the sanctimony that surrounds the Second
Amendment, revealing the colonial, racist core of the right to bear
arms. You simply cannot understand the United States and its
disastrous gun-mania without the brilliant Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz as
a guide."—Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: Taking
Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age "There is no more
interesting historian of the United States than Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz. And with Loaded she has done it again, taking a topic
about which so much has already been written, distilling it down,
turning it inside out, and allowing us to see American history
anew."—Walter Johnson, author of River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and
Empire in the Mississippi Valley's Cotton Kingdom "Loaded is a
compelling antidote to historical amnesia about the brutal origins
of the United States’ unique 'gun culture.’ Dunbar-Ortiz draws on
decades of historical scholarship to illuminate the practice of
Native genocide while framing the Second Amendment as the grounds
for a violence-based nationalism."—Caroline E. Light, "Public
Books"
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