Loaded Read online

  PRAISE FOR LOADED: A DISARMING HISTORY OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT

  “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

  “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

  “Trigger warning! This is a superb and subtle book, not an intellectual safe space for confirming your preconceptions—whatever those might be—but rather a deeply necessary provocation. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has done it again, giving us a fluid and sweeping history of the many painful contradictions that are the deep history of America’s love–hate relationship with firearms. In understanding that history, Loaded also unpacks the contemporary pathologies of both fanatical gun culture and quixotic liberal moralizing against guns. As Dunbar-Ortiz shows us, the key connection between these antagonistic positions is their shared silence on that most pressing and persistent of American problems: economic exploitation and inequality.”

  —Christian Parenti, author of Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis

  “A provocative cultural analysis arguing that the Second Amendment and white supremacy are inextricably bound.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “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 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 The Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America

  “Loaded is a masterful synthesis of the historical origins of violence and militarism in the United States. 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 U.S. 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 of New York, author of the forthcoming book When the World Was Their Stage: A History of the Young Lords Party, 1968–1976

  “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

  “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 very first page.”

  —Bill Fletcher Jr., former president of TransAfrica Forum and syndicated writer

  “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

  “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, author of City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965

  “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 discip
lines.”

  —Michael Yellow Bird, professor and director of Tribal and Indigenous Peoples Studies at North Dakota State University

  “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

  “In her trenchant analysis of the Second Amendment, Dunbar-Ortiz avoids a legalistic approach and eschews the traditional view that links the amendment to citizens’ need to protect themselves from a tyrannical government… . [Her] argument will be disturbing and unfamiliar to most readers, but her evidence is significant and should not be ignored.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  LOADED

  A Disarming History of the Second Amendment

  Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  City Lights Books | San Francisco

  Copyright © 2018 by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  All Rights Reserved.

  The Open Media Series is edited by Greg Ruggiero.

  Cover design by Herb Thornby

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, 1939-author.

  Title: Loaded : a disarming history of the Second Amendment / Roxanne Dunbar

  Ortiz.

  Description: San Francisco : City Lights Books, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017037851 (print) | LCCN 2017045903 (ebook) | ISBN 9780872867239 (paperback) | ISBN 9780872867246 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Firearms ownership—United States—History. | United States.

  Constitution. 2nd Amendment—History. | Firearms—Law and legislation—United States—History. | Firearms and crime—United States—History. | United States—Militia—History.

  Classification: LCC HV7436 (ebook) | LCC HV7436 .D86 2017 (print) | DDC

  323.4/3—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037851

  City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore

  261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133

  www.citylights.com

  I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.

  —Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967 speech at Riverside Church, New York City

  CONTENTS

  Introduction:

  Gun Love

  Chapter 1:

  Historical Context of the Second Amendment

  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

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  GUN LOVE

  In the summer of 1970, while I was living and organizing in New Orleans with a women’s study-action group, we discovered that our group had been infiltrated. One of the volunteers who had come to work with our project six months earlier was secretly making detailed reports of our meetings, but with distortions and outright lies, using terms like “extreme,” “fanatic,” “potentially violent.” We were aware that she was a Social Work graduate student at Brandeis University, but had no idea we were the topic of her dissertation or that she was associated with the government-funded Lamberg Center for the Study of Violence. She had also lied to us about her background, claiming that she came from a single-parent family with a working mother in Mobile, Alabama. We had not checked out her history, but it only took one phone call to learn that she came from a wealthy, social register Mobile family. When confronted, she appeared earnestly sorry and tried to convince us that she had been required to report on us in order to continue receiving her stipend, without which she supposedly could not continue her studies at the university.

  After her departure, we became caught up in a current of repression and paranoia. One or two or three pale blue New Orleans police cars parked across the street from our building every day. The cops took pictures, and a suspicious, unmarked car with Illinois plates followed us. Older local activists told us the cars’ occupants were “red squad” detectives from the Chicago Police Department. We installed a heavy lock on the flimsy wooden door to our run-down building, but we did not feel safe.

  After a week of heavy police surveillance, we began receiving telephone calls from a man claiming to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The man threatened to burn down our building, and, of course, we didn’t trust the police, so we did not report it. Instead, we decided to arm ourselves. We saw it as a practical step, not a political act, something we needed for self-defense in order to continue working, not at all embracing armed struggle, which our group opposed as a strategy for making change in the United States. We knew that law enforcement authorities would think twice about attacking us if they knew we were armed. In reality, we were joining a trend occurring in movement groups across the country at that time, and once armed, our mindsets changed to match the new reality.

  Two of us drove across the Lake Ponchartrain Causeway to a gun show that was held weekly in a large tin shed on the Slidell fairgrounds. The pickups and vans of traveling gun dealers, with license plates from a dozen states, were parked around the site; I had a cousin in Oklahoma who made his living selling guns that way. Inside the shed, the scene was festive, like any ordinary weekend craft fair or flea market. There were children running and playing, older women sitting on folding chairs visiting with each other, younger women clutching infants and staying close to their men, vendors hawking wares and bargaining, Confederate battle flags waving. Everyone was white. We had no trouble finding the used 9mm automatics we sought. We chose three used Brownings for $100 each, clips included, and a case of military surplus ammunition.

  “We’re looking for a shotgun, too,” I said to the dealer.

  “For protection or duck huntin’?” the vendor asked.

  “Protection.”

  He offered us a Mossberg 500 12-gauge police special riot gun, with a short barrel.

  “Isn’t it illegal to have this weapon?” I asked.

  “Ain’t a sawed-off, legal as taxes.”

  We bought it, along with some buckshot shells, all for cash. No paperwork required. The man who sold us the guns also had for sale a number of swastikas in various forms—pins, arm patches, photographs.

  We went to the Tulane Law Library to research Louisiana gun laws and found that there were no gun laws in Louisiana. The only restriction was against building an arsenal—defined as more than twenty automatic or semiautomatic weapons—for illegal purposes. Carrying concealed and loaded weapons within the state with no registration was entirely legal. Federal laws prohibited transporting firearms across state lines for sale or to commit a crime, possession of stolen weapons, removal of serial numbers, and various foreign weapons, such as the AK-47.

  We kept the loaded shotgun at the door, and we joined an indoor shooting gallery at Lafayette Square. We practiced with the Brownings every day. Shotguns weren’t allowed at the shooting club, but a shotgun took no skill to fire, only nerve and a steady shoulder. Soon after, we acquired rifles and joined a rifle club in the West Bank area. We loaded the
bed of our station wagon with four M-1s, a Winchester .22, a .30-30 with a scope, and the riot shotgun, all purchased at the gun shows in Slidell. We paid for membership in the National Rifle Association and affixed their red and black emblem to the back window of the car. Cops were known to not stop vehicles with the stickers, although that probably didn’t work for African Americans.

  We acquired more small arms and went daily to the Lafayette Square pistol shooting gallery to practice. In addition to the Brownings, we now owned a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .357, an S&W long-barrel .38, a Walther PPK 9mm, a Colt .45, and a Beretta .32 automatic. We’d purchased all the weapons legally and anonymously at gun shows. We soon had a closet full of guns, plus our new shotgun reloading equipment and a 100-pound bag of gunpowder.

  We spent hours every day breaking down, cleaning, oiling, and polishing our weapons. We took turns loading shotgun shells. We had fallen under the spell of guns. Our relationship to them had become a kind of passion that was inappropriate to our political objectives, and it ended up distorting and determining them.

  Knowing that the FBI intercepted our mail, and wanting to inform authorities that we were fully armed, I wrote to my father about my new hobbies—guns and gunsmithing. Ironically, it seemed the first thing I’d done in my life that he really understood and supported.

  “When you can shoot a squirrel in the eye with a .22 at forty yards on the first shot, you’ll be a shooter,” he wrote.

  He must have been pleasantly surprised, because he knew that as a child I was terrified of his Remington .22 rifle and shotgun; I got it from my mother, who hated guns. I never asked her why, but she put the fear and hate in my sister and me. Notwithstanding her objections, my two older brothers followed our father. At adolescence, each one started hunting and brought home game, which was our major meat item. We were poor, and ammunition was expensive, so they all had to be good shots, practicing on bottles and cans with BB guns for years before they handled real firearms. It was all for hunting, practical, but there was that other element I could detect but not explain, until I fell in love with guns.