Dunbar-Ortiz dismantles an argument popular among gun-control advocates: that the Second Amendment isn’t about individual rights. This argument, based on historian Richard Hofstadter’s scholarship, insists that when the Second Amendment was written, it actually referred only to state militias (and therefore eventually the National Guard, rather than private citizens).
But this isn’t so. Dunbar-Ortiz describes at length the hyperviolent, irregular warfare tactics used to make way for settlement and commodification of the United States, and the official encouragement and essential deputization of private, rogue militias (nothing more than armed civilians) that waged this warfare. The group-sounding language, Dunbar-Ortiz says, “specifically gave individuals and families the right to form volunteer militias to attack Indians and take their land.” Morally repugnant, to be sure. But legally correct.
She drives home historian John Grenier’s theory, which, once again, readers of An Indigenous Peoples’ History will no doubt recognize: the violence fueled racism, rather than merely the other way around. This point is central, and it stands out among the many conversations about guns in the United States. In this view, one finds violence itself at the root. Violence is a means to acquire land and capital, and it predates racial prejudice. Violence is a means to culture. Quoting Grenier, she writes:
Successive generations of Americans, both soldiers and civilians, made the killing of Indian men, women, and children a defining element of their first military tradition and thereby part of a shared American identity. Indeed, only after seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Americans made the first way of war a key to being a white American could later generations of “Indian haters,” men like Andrew Jackson, turn the Indian wars into race wars.
The overwhelmingly violent settling of the United States may not in and of itself make for a broadly convincing explanation for America’s undying obsession with guns. We are not the only country with bloody origins. But Loaded does not stop at the colonies, nor at the “winning of the West.” Dunbar-Ortiz follows the imperial project of the United States as it marched into Mexico, the Philippines, Cuba, and Vietnam.
Perhaps even closer to the bone is Dunbar-Ortiz’s brief history of slave patrols, rifle clubs, and the KKK. “Southern settlers had long relied on ‘self-help’ measures to enforce slavery leading up to the formalized slave patrols,” she writes. These groups only thrived in the continued reinforcement of individual gun rights, along with the development of the arms industry in the years after abolition.
The author notes that in the decades after abolition, there would have been, for African Americans, very little distinction made between slave patrols, the KKK, and police. In some very painful and indeed deadly ways, Loaded argues, this lack of distinction more or less lives on today.
[T]he language of slave patrols is still employed in police work in the twenty-first century, “patrol” being the most obvious, but also “beat.” More disturbingly, techniques were folded into police practices, such as surveillance methods like the stakeout. And until the 1960s pushback, police had little supervision and routinely brutalized and confined suspects without consequences; even in the twenty-first century, when police torture or murder Black people, juries rarely find the involved officers guilty.
Even for gun control advocates and liberals leery of militarized police, the full depth of this idea that guns are fundamentally tools of racism may be uncomfortable to confront. But it is that depth and discomfort that sets Loaded apart from the near constant and often dead-ended discussions about gun violence in the United States. As is the case with much of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s work, Loaded demands of its readers that history be seen as a continuum to which the present belongs.
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