America loves guns. From Daniel Boone and Jesse James, to the NRA and Seal Team 6, gun culture has colored the lore, shaped the law, and protected the market that arms the nation. In Loaded, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz peels away the myths of gun culture to expose the true historical origins of the Second Amendment, revealing the racial undercurrents connecting the earliest Anglo settlers with contemporary gun proliferation, modern-day policing, and the consolidation of influence of armed white nationalists. From the enslavement of Blacks and the conquest of Native America, to the arsenal of institutions that constitute the "gun lobby," Loaded presents a people's history of the Second Amendment, as seen through the lens of those who have been most targeted by guns: people of color. Meticulously researched and thought-provoking throughout, this is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the historical connections between racism and gun violence in the United States.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She is the author of many books, including Outlaw Woman, a memoir of the 1960s and her time in an armed underground group, and the acclaimed An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States.She lives in San Francisco.
Praise for Loaded:
"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
"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 is a major spokesperson for what might be called the 'new exceptionalism.' Instead of viewing the United States as a model that other nations should imitate, a new generation of historians finds the United States to be a society founded on genocide, slavery and male domination, and permeated by hatred toward those who are different. In her earlier book, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Ortiz argued that the legacy of its Indian wars shaped the United States' military practices in, for example, the Philippines. 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
