Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (City Lights Open Media) by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (City Lights Open Media) Reviews

• 
  Stacy

  Look, if anyone was going to love this book, it was me. I was waiting with open arms to be educated by Dunbar-Ortiz and devour her every word. I was under the impression that this was a well-researched, exceptionally articulate, thoughtful, and compelling treatise about the second amendment. Clearly, I was misled.
  
  This book is actually a poorly constructed, seemingly unedited, dizzying anecdotal ride through racism in the United States. Also, guns are occasionally mentioned. Once in a great while the reader is given an explanation of how the two are related. But most of the time it is unclear how even any two adjacent paragraphs are related, much less the main topics.
  
  I am quite certain that there is much validity in (what as far as I can tell seems to be) Dunbar-Ortiz’s thesis: American gun culture has big roots in racism and fear. I also agree that our illogical worship of the second amendment is detrimental to society. I believe this is true and something that people need to understand. This is probably not the best book to use in order to understand it.
  
  There were exactly two paragraphs in the final chapter that were fabulous. They discuss how those with real power (ie the rich) encourage those who are actually powerless to believe in a false symbolic power (ie guns). That particular bit left me a little breathless. It is magnificent how perfect that explanation is. However, that portion was mostly quoted from another book authored by Mark Ames. Kudos to Dunbar-Ortiz for bringing to my attention, but her book is still awful.
  
  Dunbar-Ortiz’s approach is misguided and poorly presented. The book is not written in a logical manner. It seems poorly edited and slapped together. Her stories meander through time and topics sometimes without a clear reason why they were included or without any segue from one to the other. The fact that the library acquisition date stamped on this copy is “Feb 2018” and yet the book references events that have happened in 2018, tells me my assumptions are correct: “Loaded” sure seems like it was rushed through publication with little editing in order for the sales to ride the current wave of public concern about gun control.
  
  Aside from the appalling disorganization there are deeper flaws. She paints her picture with giant brushes of generalities. Her view is an extreme and simplistic one. It fails to acknowledge any subtlety, any gray areas, any complexity. She takes a portion of the truth and blows it up so large that she can no longer see the whole. She is fixated on her one angle and cannot look toward any other part of the story. That doesn’t make her portion incorrect. But it makes her outlook suspect.
  
  Frankly, I find “Loaded” to be nearly, if not entirely, as harmful to the conversation as the other side’s extremist propaganda. She is adding little of actual value to the conversation. I see this book as an agitator for further extremism on both sides, not as a helpful resource. Fighting stereotypes and hatred with more stereotypes and hatred serves no purpose. Books like this are why we cannot have a productive conversation about gun control in this country.
• 
  Kristi Thielen

  I purchased this book on the assumption that it was a thoughtful, if not scholarly study of the Second Amendment and the varied opinions about it.
  
  I was wrong.
  
  Author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s bona fides are apparently slender; nothing is referenced in her bio beyond what other books she has written and where she lives. Her thinking and writing is – florid. She is given to wild generalities and provocative oversimplifications. She never uses a scalpel to dissect an issue, preferring a meat cleaver.
  
  Here and there she makes some statements that can be buttressed with facts or are evident to anyone who has experienced American culture. Guns were pivotal in our early history because of the efforts to subdue indigenous peoples and maintain control over African slaves. And southern guerillas, steeped in a tradition of abuse to black people, were allowed to be repackaged as western heroes, in the days of the Old West.
  
  I get all that.
  
  But the author continually veers off her path and destroys her credibility when she does. So anxious is she to condemn the American government at every turn that she scarcely credits it for fighting a Civil War against slavery. And she insists that one of the reasons troops were pulled out of the south prematurely during Reconstruction was so they could be sent west to kill Indians. Ron Chernow in his excellent book “Grant,” provides an extensive history of why Reconstruction failed and says nothing about this. Frankly, I trust his scholarship more than I do Dunbar-Ortiz’s.
  
  The author also conflates the gun violence perpetrated in America with the use of guns and other weapons during wars fought by the U.S. government. The latter has been addressed in better books than this. It isn’t a topic that belongs in a work about the Second Amendment.
  
  I’m a liberal in search of well-reasoned facts about why the Second Amendment needs to be reexamined so that gun violence can be addressed. I didn’t find them here and you won’t either.
  .
  
• 
  Audacia Ray

  The well-backed up argument of this book is that the American obsession with guns is inextricably linked to white supremacy, both in the genocide of indigenous peoples on this land and in the control over enslaved Black people by exterminating militias which evolved into police forces. Dunbar-Ortiz takes apart some of the common discourse around the Second Amendment and shows how all of these arguments are really dogwhistle racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. This book is deeply important in a moment in which white and light skinned youth are becoming the face of the gun control debate.
• 
  Randall Wallace

  Top historians have shown that had there never been Indigenous in US history, the white European invaders would not have survived. In the words of Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, “Without guns, there would be no West.” “They (our forefathers) stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, cotton and other crops domesticated centuries before the arrival of European invaders took control of the deep parks that had been cleared and maintained Indigenous communities, used existing roads, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs.”
  
  The Vatican brought the world the Doctrine of Discovery in the mid-fifteenth century, which ‘legalized’ Portuguese enslavement of Blacks from Africa. This was sadly one of the first principles of international law – allowing thieving and the hurting of people who don’t look like you. Spain then said, “Why do the Portuguese get to have all the fun?” and soon Spain gets a papal bull granting them the same rights. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) grants Spain and Portugal the right to do whatever you wanted in non-Christian lands. All European states soon relied on this Doctrine and the race was on to see which theoretically Christian nation could defile the teachings of Christ the most. That race is still on.
  
  Calvinism had offered narcissists the idea you too could both be personally chosen by God, and have material wealth (in spite of what Jesus said). Wealth became the new Black and was now a sign of being among the chosen (for a price). Once obscene wealth accumulation became Christian, it was a short hop to the candy shop to make also race (and other markers of difference) into chosen “signs” to legitimatize control. Calvinists made the nastiest settlers because of the delusional “chosen by God” mantra which left them feeling more entitled and chosen than Terence Trent D’Arby, or both Liam and Noel Gallagher.
  
  Instead of seeing religion in nature and all around them, these settlers saw religion in wealth creation completely at the expense of the “unchosen” Indigenous. Remember that when it came to the blood spilling for whites to acquire the length of this continent; most of the blood spilled was Native. The United States is indeed “exceptional” as (unlike other countries) it was based on the enslavement of human beings and unchecked brutal settler-colonialism.
  
  After the gun he used to Trayvon Martin sold for $250,000 , George Zimmerman said he thanked God. Under the “Yeoman farmer” banner, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson helped to maintain the “face of a classless society.” But if I want to be in a society completely without class, I’ll go to Mar-A-Lago.
  
  The NRA began as a way to help marksmanship after the Civil War. During the Depression, the NRA testified for legislation against machine guns falling into the hands of criminals. Before 1975, the NRA were responsible about gun regulations and not over-fetishizing the Second Amendment.
  
  American Racism: During Obama’s Presidency, gun sales went through the roof (“an eight-year sugar high”) because the great American bigot went nuts that Obama was going to take his guns away. “But as soon as Trump was elected, stock prices for the major gun companies plummeted and they haven’t fully recovered.”
  
  Like the Uvalde shooting, the 1999 Columbine shooting also had chicken $h!T policemen who stayed outside until the shooting (lasting several hours) stopped. The white press tending to say certain school shootings were the “worst” massacre in US history, is a painful erasure of Native history. Erasing a people, and then erasing the erasure.
  
  The ideology of those who rule this country today can be found in the “settlers who fought their way over the Appalachians.” This book brilliantly makes you ask WHY the need for armed militias in the Second Amendment of the US Constitution? To stop thieves and actual law breakers in a posse? Don’t be silly. The Second Amendment allowed “settlers to control black populations”, and “individual settlers to combat Native communities”. Provisions of the Second Amendment “mandated every citizen, slaver or not, to capture and return people caught escaping from slavery”. Gun culture helps Americans who can’t find Europe on a map of the world, continue the centuries long application of “white nationalism, racialized dominance and social control through violence.” The Second Amendment’s original job was to stop Indigenous and Black resistance to having one’s lands, lives or freedom taken. The Second Amendment’s job was not JUST the right to bear arms, but an actual requirement to bear arms.
  
  In 1619, Virginia gets its first “shipment” of bonded Africans. We know that George Washington was a surveyor, but George had a different approach: he took his Virginia militia with him into the Ohio country armed. Land “speculation” is much more lucrative when you add the threat of brute force. Luckily for George, “violent appropriation of Native land by white settlers was seen as an individual right in the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, second only to free speech.” In Virginia, you couldn’t travel unless you were well armed. There was a law that demanded you take arms to church and to work, or you’d be fined. In 1658, Virginia demanded each settler home had to have “a functioning firearm.” In 1632, New Englanders had to have that plus “two pounds of powder and ten pounds of bullets.” “No man was to appear at a public meeting unarmed.”
  
  Trump’s hero, Andrew Jackson had troops that “fashioned reins for their horse’s bridals from skin stripped from the Muskogee people they had killed.” So, Trump’s interest in strippers, goes WAY back. As historian Alan Brinkley tells us, Jackson’s perceived fame was in eradicating the Native population. When Marines sing “the shores of Tripoli” they are glorifying the US attack on Berbers for the crime of wanting their sovereignty over territorial waters to be respected. How dare those Berbers want the same respect we want? When Marines sing “the halls of Montezuma”, they are glorifying the US invasion of Mexico in 1847 where the Marines march to Mexico City, “burning fields and villages, murdering and torturing civilian resisters.” Apparently if you enjoy a short haircut and a loaded gun, you can do whatever you want. Who knew? US fiction authors start “the myth of the essential white American”.
  
  During the Hippie 60’s, Robbie Robertson writes “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” which boldly mourns the Confederate defeat to the sound of crickets from liberal music critics. Even more surprising, is that Robbie is part Mohawk (and part Stockholm Syndrome). The film True Grit, sympathetic to Confederate guerrillas, was sold to children. Not ones to lay the tired myth to rest, Ethan and Joel Cohen redid True Grit with Jeff Bridges in John Wayne role. Clint Eastwood’s Josey Wales character was also a Confederate guerrilla. The guy who wrote the script for Josey Wales had been a leader in the Ku Klux Klan and a speechwriter for George Wallace in the 60’s. His own son beat him to death in 1979; live by violence, die by violence. Surprise, surprise. Popular culture glorifies Western gunfighters; even the writer of Masters of War, Bob Dylan eagerly did a cameo in Pat Garret and Billy the Kidd.
  
  “61% of all adults who own guns are white men” and the biggest reason for ownership is stated as protection. But “What are the majority of white men so afraid of?” rightly asks Roxanne. So, we know that right wingers live for their guns (theoretically for their own protection) and MAGA hats, yet two-thirds of US annual gun deaths (averaging 37,000 per year) are suicides. Gun owners are statistically and strangely more apt to kill themselves, than use their guns to try and stop a bad guy.
  
  Daniel Boone’s fame rested on a long career of killing animals – not for food, but just for their skin (pelts). He was an “industrial hunter”. So popular was this “business” that buckskins became known as bucks, as slang for a dollar.
  
  Teddy Roosevelt loved hunting and wrote “a race of peaceful, unwarlike farmers would have been helpless before such foes as the red Indians.” He had a point; “peaceful unwarlike farmers” would not guarantee the creation of “foes”. Teddy was proud of the ruthless slaughter of the American buffalo. Teddy believed in Social Darwinism, eugenics, and wearing outdated eyewear. Coming from a life of enormous privilege, he looked down on those who killed animals for food or to sell for cash. Imagine believing aristocratic hunting would somehow revitalize the “superior class of the species.”
  
  Note that, Roxanne reminds us that most of these murdering a-hole settlers were Protestant, not Catholic. They believed in what Richard Slotkin calls “regeneration through violence.” Just like their Darwinian cousins, serial murderers have also told aghast listeners how killing the helpless made them feel alive and regenerated.
  
  The Second Amendment legitimizes white people eliminating “Indigenous communities in order to take their land, and for slave patrols to control Black people.” “The Virginia militia was created for one purpose: to kill Indians, take their land, drive them out, wipe them out.” “All adult male settlers were required to serve in the militia.” “Stiff fines” were imposed on whites “who refused to serve.” The Second Amendment covers up “a capitalist enterprise carried out through atrocities of violence, territorial theft, and mass displacement, not an adventure.” It’s a short trip from here to thinking you have the right to military bases anywhere you want and to overthrow any foreign government you think has gotten in your way.
  
  The majority of poverty program recipients are white not black. To prove it’s not braindead, the CIA acknowledged that 9/11 was blowback from the long history of US extensive training and arming of extremist Muslims. “White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and skinhead groups encourage followers to enlist in the Army and marine Corps to acquire the skills to overthrow” what some extremists call the “Zionist Occupation Government.” A 2005 US department of Defense report stated: “The Military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy pertaining to extremism.” In 2006, almost 20% of military recruits were allowed in on a “moral waiver”.
  
  An army commander in 1871 in a brief moment of candor said, “The entire United States Army would be insufficient to give protection throughout the South to everyone in possible danger from the Klan.” The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 helped colonization and military occupation through bloodshed.
  
  Murderer Dylann Roof feared the loss of white supremacy, but apparently not the ability to spell Dylan. How dare progress take away Dylann’s perceived freedom and liberty? And why couldn’t people sympathize with Dylann’s lack of sympathy? If you squint, white nationalists today sure look a lot like past US settlers in search of an all-white nation.
  
  Pamela Haag’s book “The Gunning of America” leaves out both the armed slave patrols and the rape and destruction of Native communities by voluntary militia. She won’t tell you those Natives who were fought in the Indian wars were of foreign nations. Pamela dramatically underplays the role of guns in establishing the edge against Natives. She wants you to think gun culture was only commercially manufactured. She won’t tell you colonists “were armed to the teeth” and a greater percentage of colonists had guns than US citizens did today. In the mid-1880’s “Passengers were loaned Winchesters to shoot buffalo out of train windows as they traveled across the Plains.” Killing and inflicting pain not for food, or even cash, but for hiding inadequacy or alleviating white boredom.
  
  Let’s have the creator of the Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, weigh in on now the topic on how conduct US foreign policy: “Our only safety depends on the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, follow it up with one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”
  
  Riddle: What did Teddy Roosevelt call the land he stole from Natives? National Parks. Seriously, we are talking here about Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. Before you thank God when you see them again, thank the parks’ long-term Native caretakers before the land theft by TR and his Pince-nez.
  
  Andrew Bacevich sees “endless wars as the backlash to the US military defeat in Vietnam.” The US is also the world’s largest exporter of military weapons; I picture the billboard, “When You Want to Kill Fellow Humans Choose only US brand Arms and Tobacco”. While you’re saluting the flag, here’s the top US Slaughter Suppliers: Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamic, and United Technologies.
  
  You get lots of cool facts in this book such as: there are more gun clubs and gun shops in the US than McDonald’s. This book was terrific. I recently read 95 pages of Frank Smyth’s “The NRA” and thought “Boy, I learned more about the NRA in one page of Roxanne’s book then I did in 95 pages of this yawn-fest.”
  
  And, don’t read just “Loaded”, everything written by Roxanne is great.
  
• 
  Sezín Koehler

  Absolutely a must-read for every American, and also for anyone who wants to understand the true roots of the Second Amendment and American gun culture.
• 
  Cailleach

  I finished, i don't feel good about, I highly recommend reading it.
• 
  David

  I managed to read the introduction and the first chapter and called it quits. I struggled with the author's style, it felt absolutist and conclusory (I'm not sure whether I'm using the word properly - my complaint is that the author presents her ideas forcefully and without building a proper foundation).
  
  We have a gun problem in America (and a prescription drug problem but that's a separate issue altogether) and I was looking forward to a unique perspective on the 2nd amendment but I'll have to look elsewhere.
  
  Note - My issue here is with style, not content. The author may be absolutely right about everything she says but I was too distracted and annoyed to want to continue.
• 
  Matt

  I have some of the same criticisms of this book that I see other people expressing on the boards here. What it boils down to for me is Loaded hits on important points that have been neglected in the discussion of America's love affair with guns, namely how the Second Amendment clearly was a mandate to allow frontier individuals the ability of fighting off and attacking Native people in their vicinity for the sake of American expansion.
  
  Meanwhile, guns were clearly a necessary tool for the southern plantation owners to control their large populations of slaves, in the same way they're necessary for guards in prisons to possess today. In effect, the Second Amendment is traceable to America's fear of racial difference, need for conquest, and desire for free labor to cultivate said conquests.
  
  I felt this thesis of Loaded could have been a little better articulated, though. I'd like to have seen more evidence of how America had a standing army and a competent militia to defend it against foreign and domestic threats (as a long cited reason for gun ownership has been to fend off the tyrannical agenda of a too powerful Federal government).
  
  These aspects of the narrative were touched on in brief, particularly in noting the wrongheadedness of Michael A. Bellesiles's Arming America and its flimsy, false scholarship designed to present the Second Amendment as a means of correcting the fact that America's early standing militias were poorly armed and not as a mandate for individuals to own guns. Dunbar-Ortiz makes a strong argument against the logic of this position, and instead presents the aforementioned racial - economic logic of the Second Amendment's existence. The threads are all there, and compelling, but I don't entirely feel they were tied together as strongly as they could have been. That said, much of the history she offers is exceedingly well-researched and sound. It is a worthy mapping of the true nature of gun culture in America and definitely a book I'd recommend with that in mind.
• 
  Miles

  Cannot stress enough, this is essential reading for anyone who wants to have an informed discussion about gun control in the United States. After reading, there will no longer be room for a conversation about 2nd amendment reform that does not include a comprehensive examination of racial domination in the fabric of America's founding, and a concrete plan to combat anti-blackness—not simply one that regulates guns, the tool that is most commonly used to enforce and distribute said anti-blackness. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has contributed an invaluable perspective to a conversation that has recently reached a fever pitch. It will remain to be seen whether her cautioning to pay attention to racism/settler colonialism will be in time for the discussion on gun control to be one that ultimately is fruitful.
• 
  Kristiana Gomez

  Unreal. The most insightful, shocking, eye-opening book I've ever read. I am recommending it to everyone. Gun culture in America is obviously a huge issue right now, and Dunbar-Ortiz' meticulous outlining of its origins and development really helped me understand why America is what it is today.
• 
  Melissa

  This book was much more than I was expecting, not only a history of the 2nd Amendment and guns in America, but a history of the United States itself and the politics that have made guns a part of our culture (and not necessarily for the reasons you might think). Very informative and based on her history in this book, I’ll definitely be checking out her An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (which has been on my never ending to-read list for awhile now).
• 
  Nate

  I'm along for the ride when it comes to Dunbar Ortiz's thesis of America as first and foremost a white supremacist project of stealing land. Lots of convincing history in here to back things up.
  But I thought this was supposed to be a book about guns and the 2nd Amendment. They are mentioned here and there, I suppose.
• 
  Quentin

  A harsh, unsparing book where standard pro and anti-gun readers alike will find little support or purchase. Dunbar-Ortiz draws on her deep understanding of US history, politics, and culture to explore why simplistic readings of the Second Amendment to the US constitution fail to capture it's real historical importance. In essence, she argues the Second Amendment is neither an anachronistic entrenchment of State militias now superceded by the National Guard, nor is it an unmitigated or unabridged right of any citizen to own firearms. Rather, it is an attempt to enshrine the elite social position of White men by giving them access to the means to violently protect it.
  
  She traces the origins of the Second Amendment and it's simultaneous concern with individuals and militias to colonial militia raiding parties that invaded, scattered, and destroyed indigenous communities. These militias were essentially non-state armies, only loosely related to colonial governance. Such militias were also deployed, as she later notes, to police and re-capture escaped Africans and African-Americans enslaved on plantations in the South. These two roles--killing Indians and patrolling for slaves--form the crucial historical nexus from which the Second Amendment drew its legal, political, and economic meanings. In essence, she argues that the right to own guns was a non-military means of conquest and control, with the State shifting the responsibility for such conquest onto individual White men through the granting of rights of gun ownership. She later traces such emphases into various cultural and historical domains including Westward expansion, late-20th century conservative politics, and modern Nationalist ideologies. All in all, it shifts the terms of the gun debate in the US into very uncomfortable but largely necessary areas, re-thinking the simplistic regulation-focused debate into something much more complex and historical, but truthfully resonant.
  
  So, why three stars? I am loathe to judge so rich a book by its organization and editing, but it's really poorly edited and not very focused in making its point. I counted at least two incomplete sentences and a few slighter grammatical errors. Additionally, the chapters are very rambling in their argument, with subjects often turning on a dime into a related but distinct subject. I had a hard time following the overall flow of the argument, even as individual discussions, anecdotes, and analysis were very interesting. I suspect that the book was not given a firm editorial hand, because a decent editor would hone this thing to a fine point, and caught the grammatical errors that I saw.
  
  So, a good book, though not necessarily an easy read, both for its difficult subject matter, and also for its rather poor structure and rhetoric.
• 
  Richard

  There was a flourishing civilization in North America when white explorers arrived from Europe. The natives had culture, history, spiritualism, language, agriculture, and trade. They lived on a massive amount of fertile land. The "settlers" had guns.
  
  This original, insightful, and well researched book by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz shows how guns were used to steal the land from the natives, control slaves brought in to farm it, and were part and parcel of the launching a new country. America was founded on guns and continues to be captivated by, and captive to, firepower. From massacring native Americans, to controlling peoples stolen from Africa, to gunboat diplomacy, to the big business of selling weapons to the world, and to the spending more on it's military that nearly every other nation combined, the Unites States continues to built on a history of guns.
  
  Rather than focusing on the knee jerk reaction of calling for gun control after each massive shooting, Dunbar-Ortiz shows that the issue goes back hundreds of years and that the second amendment is entwined with the history of white America. I'm sure many on "the right" will attack this book as being "revisionist history", but what the author points out is the history we have been taught has already been rewritten. From the dime store novels of the 1800's turning gunslingers into legends through 1950's television painting Daniel Boone as a larger than life hero, we have been fed a "white bread" history. Dunbar-Ortiz strips off the candy coating and shows us the real history of guns in the United States and it is not a pretty picture.
  
  This book should be part of every High School history class and a must read for those of us who missed receiving this information when we were in school. Bravo Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz!
• 
  Jacob

  “Loaded” is one of those rare books where the thesis itself is a game-changer—not simply an expansion of something you already believe, well packaged and cited—but an upheaval in the way you think about an issue. Dunbar-Ortiz takes no prisoners in the destruction of mythology behind both arguments present in today’s gun debate. Firstly, she challenges the liberal argument that the 2nd Amendment was not meant to be an individual right. This was something that I believed, mostly because of the wording, not because of any deeply researched belief. Despite that, the inconvenient truth Dunbar-Ortiz lays out is undeniable, the 2nd Amendment was absolutely meant to be an individual right. I’ll leave the reasoning for the book, but this is laid out so effectively that it cannot be denied by the end.
  
  It’s not all good news for gun enthusiasts, though. “Loaded”s primary reason for being is to explain the reasoning behind why the second amendment was included in the Bill of Rights, and it’s not at all pretty. Dunbar-Ortiz lays out a convincing case for the gun culture in America leading to the second amendment and existing all the way until today: and it begins with the genocide of the indigenous peoples by British colonists in the new world. Not only were guns protection against “savage” natives, they were used in brutal attacks against entire villages, where men, women, and children were killed indiscriminately for their land. Scalps of natives were collected for sport and for reward, incentivizing the slaughters by colonial government. Some colonial governments even passed laws requiring colonists to carry or own firearms. Slave patrols were also necessary to keep the human chattel in check in the south. This required rotating groups of volunteers, slaveholders and not, to ride horses and patrol for escaped slaves.
  
  Dunbar-Ortiz argues that both of these groups embodied what was meant by “militia” in the second amendment, since the national guard is already established in the original document. Thus, the second amendment itself was included as a right in order to facilitate control over populations regarded as subhuman. Is it just a coincidence that to this day 82 percent of gun owners are white? She makes a convincing argument that until either side can come to terms with the whitewashing and mythmaking that has occurred, gun violence will continue to flourish.
• 
  AJ

  I am generously rounding this review up to 2 stars. I would give it 1.5 stars for keeping my brain warm during some cold winter days.
  
  I'm a fan of
  Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. I've read a few of her other works and was looking forward to a well-researched history and takedown of the second amendment. That is not what this book is. To be honest, after having read this book (and it took me two months to force myself to finish) I'm still not sure what it is about. The book tells a fascinating history of racism against Indigenous people in the United States and how guns were used to uphold the federal policies of mass genocide, and once the "west" was settled (by white colonists, of course), how guns were used to uphold slavery and racism before, during, and after the Civil War.
  
  But that narrative is only a small part of the book. The rest consists of a lot of other loosely-related narratives that are nominally related to guns. Honestly, I found myself skimming because this book was both uninteresting, not compelling, and not even remotely about what the title or blurb would have you believe.
  
  I am still interested in reading a good history and takedown of the second amendment. Perhaps one day I'll find that book!
• 
  La Crosse Public Library

  Loaded is an analysis of the Second Amendment and its historic context, as well as America's gun culture. The language of the Second Amendment has long been a subject of debate, with the curious framing of poorly defined "militias" preceding the direct statement on the right to bear arms. Dunbar-Ortiz explains how that qualification directly originates from America's genocidal expropriation of indigenous people's land, as well as the policing of African slaves. She then follows the ownership and use of guns through American history, shedding new light on our relationship with guns today. Loaded is a great read for anyone looking for deeper context of our deeply rooted gun culture in the United States. This book illuminates how gun control laws cannot solve the problems of gun violence in our culture if we do not make peace with our country's history.
  
  ~Peter, Library Assistant
• 
  Brendan

  Quick, readable explanation of what the Second Amendment is really about. (Hint: it's white supremacy!) Efficiently dismantles a lot of mythology about both guns and the United States. If we want to find a way out of our gun mess, we have to understand what the mess actually is. Really valuable book.
• 
  Sonia Allison

  Abolish guns requires INCREASE BLACK WOMEN
  
  
  I love this book and it's thorough truths. US Imperialism requires white gun shooting murderousness from its beginning.
  Loaded
  shows that to abolish guns requires that we abolish whiteness.
  
  
• 
  A

  A rant against guns that does not make it past the intellectual realm of hysteria.
• 
  Jim Robles

  Four stars for this essential, if sometimes incoherent, read. The author seems angry, but then we should all be angry.
  
  Being a full citizen in Charlemagne's empire required having a horse, saddle, bridle, shield, sword, spear, etc.; all of sufficient quality. Likewise American settlers were expected, and in many cases required, to have guns and ammunition and to sever in voluntary militias. The purpose of these militias was twofold: first to exterminate indigenous population to allow occupation of their developed villages and agricultural lands; and second to man slave patrols to keep the slave population under control.
  
  To the extent that there is still a need to keep non-White populations under control and subservient, the Second Amendment remains valid.
  
  Of course as a Conservative interpreter of the Constitution I do support your right to as many black power muskets, blunderbusses, spears, knives, etc. as you can to have.
  
  "The right to bear arms was a collective, not an individual, right, closely linked to the civic need for 'a well regulated Militia'" (17).
  
  Unequivocally, the Second Amendment, along with the other nine amendments, constituted individual rights, and the militias referenced are voluntary not state militias" (24).
  
  "These voluntary fighting crews made up of individual civilians--"rangers"--are the groups referenced as militias, as they came to be called, in the Second Amendment" (43).
  
  ". . . . . although they were attacking developed Indigenous villages and fields" (45).
  
  "As an incentive to recruit fighters, colonial authorities introduced a program of scalp hunting that became a permanent and long-lasting element of settler warfare against Indigenous nations" (45).
  
  "The militias referred to in the Second Amendment were intended as a means for white people to eliminate Indigenous communities in order to take their land, and for slave patrols to control Black people" (57).
  
  "The Virginia militia was founded for one purpose: to kill Indians, take their land, drive them out, wipe them out. European settlers were required by law to own and carry firearms, and all adult male settlers were required to serve in the militia" (61).
  
  "By the time of the attack on Lawrence a year later, Quantrill . . . . slaughtering 150 unarmed men and boys, most of the adult males of the town" (82-83).
  
  "Roosevelt . . . . In his view, the darker peoples were inferior, particularly Native Americans, who were destined to disappear completely" (102).
  
  "The U.S. Constution represents for many citizens a covenant with God, and the covenant concept goes back to the Mayflower Compact, . . . ." (113).
  
  "Such exposure drove home the fact that most of those who propagate white nationalism were not mentally ill, but rather ideologically driven, . . . . ." (152).
  
  "Household gun ownership in early America was more widespread than today (in a much poorer world)" (183).
  
  "He wrote, 'Our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up with one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth'" (193).
  
  "There are more gun clubs and gun shops in the United States than there are McDonald's" (199).
• 
  Wendi Lau

  Loaded is extremely biased.
  
  * The first review on the first page shows it: “..a new generation of historians finds the United States to be a society founded on genocide, slavery and male domination, and permeated by hatred towards those who are different” (Staughton Lynd). Whoa.
  
  * The last quote shows it: “United States is based on guns. Like KRS says, you’ll never have justice on stolen land” (rapper Ice-T).
  
  * The conclusion shows it and another book by the author shows it: An Indigenous People’s History of the United States.
  
  Yet, the cute-size book, 5”x7” and 208 pages, must be a quick read to understand the viewpoint of 2nd Amendment opponents. No. By page 65 nearly every page was festooned with post-its marking questionable statements and data.
  
  From page 18: “Killing, looting, burning, raping, and terrorizing Indians were traditions in each of the colonies long before the Constitutional Convention. ‘Militias’…were used to officially invade and occupy Native Land…The Second Amendment’s language specifically gave individuals and families the right to form volunteer militias to attack Indians and take their land.” The actual wording of the 2nd Amendment: “Amendment II: A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
  
  On page 31 Dunbar-Ortiz claims the Stamp Act was “to pay the cost of housing, feeding, and transporting soldiers to contain and suppress the colonies from expanding further into Indian territory.” And on page 54 she inaccurately describes the Barbary Pirates role in the Atlantic Ocean: “Actually, the Berbers were demanding their sovereignty over their territorial waters be respected.”
  
  This book is written convincingly enough that if I had not read otherwise from a variety of sources who themselves were heavily researched and well-read, I would believe all of Ms. Dunbar-Ortiz’s contentions. Loaded is frighteningly persuasive, however, the assertions are biased, incomplete, and inaccurate. The book in brief: U.S. bad, police bad, military bad, 2nd Amendment bad bad.
  
  I admit I could not finish the book. 65 pages plus the conclusion and frequent referrals to the footnotes was enough to get the gist of where it was headed.
• 
  Jessica Jin

  yeah, what if gun violence prevention advocates stop trying to swim upstream with this revisionist history about the 2nd amendment NOT being about individual rights?
  as one of my therapist's faves byron katie asks: "who would we be without that thought?"
  
  what if we accept the overwhelming proof that most settlers on the frontier in the US owned guns because they needed to exert power and violence over indigenous people and land, and what if we accept the fact that the next round of cementing of american gun culture came from the manufacturing of weapons for the civil war, a giant fight about exerting power and violence over black people? and what if we just all agree that cowboy westerns actually romanticize racist guerrillas? who, as americans, would we be without our age-old narratives?
  
  i don't know if any of this changes the dynamics of the policy fight at all, but it should start to lessen our sympathy for the pride americans feel over the political power that many think our gun culture represents. i'm also a little shaken by this idea she mentions re: how so many americans see guns as peak political power, not money, which takes a lot of right wing wrath-focus off of billionaires/corporate concentration??
  
  would have loved for this author to elaborate/provide a little more supporting evidence for some BIG statements she makes. like there were a few times, like the idea i just mentioned, where i was like "woah, pls help me wrap my head around that statement" but she just moves on.
  
  overall a quick worthwhile read for people who might feel stuck by the stalemate in the way people talk about guns in america. it's a start to being more curious about how we might move forward with truth in hand, not just wishful thinking.
• 
  Holly Hillard

  I finished reading this book this morning. It’s a rather dense read, but it’s not too long. I definitely recommend it to those who are interested in the connection between history and present day issues of gun violence. I think, for most issues, we can’t solve our current problems until we reckon with our past.
  
  Here’s a quote that summarizes the main premise of the book:
  
  That is the way of settler-colonialism, and that is the way of the gun-to kill off enemies and, in the case of the North American colonies and the independent United States, to control African Americans. Violence perpetuated by armed settlers, even genocide, were not absent in the other territories where the British erected settler-colonies—Australia, Canada, and New Zealand big the people of those polities never declared the gun a God-given right; only the founding fathers of the United States did that. And the people of the other Anglo settler-colonies did not have economies, governments, and social orders based on the enslavement of other human beings. The United States is indeed “exceptional,” just not in the way usually intoned by politicians and patriots.
  
  -Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
• 
  The Strumpet!

  A few years ago I read
  The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture, which also focuses on what's been called "America's gun culture." This gun culture theory is a big part of Dunbar-Ortiz's argument here: she agrees that the US has a gun culture, but disagrees with most other progressive (white) critics and historians who argue that US gun culture is an aberration from or a betrayal of essential American values. Contrary to her left-leaning colleagues, Dunbar-Ortiz argues that the 2nd Amendment does not, as they claim, apply primarily to militias rather than individual citizens. Rather, Dunbar-Ortiz agrees with conservative and even far right commentators who assert that the 2nd Amendment guarantees the right to individual gun ownership. However, unlike conservatives who praise this as a virtue of American exceptionalism, Dunbar-Ortiz shows how the arming of individual English colonists and later American citizens was integral to the violent expansion of white settlement in North America. As American settlement moved further and further west, settlers were the ones who pushed the nations borders initially, and believed (accurately) that they needed guns to defend themselves against the indigenous people whose land they were stealing. Dunbar-Oritz characterizes the 2nd Amendment as always having been written for an about the heavily armed settlers who formed the vanguard of American expansion by waging unlimited war (attacking civilians as well as combatants) against the indigenous inhabitants of land they occupied, aligning with the specific case study of this phenomenon in Texas found in
  Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History.
  
  It's also especially interesting to read this right now, in the wake of the white nationalist attack on the US Capitol on January 6. While many pundits and politicians (even on the right) have been quick to assert that that "this is not who we are," Dunbar-Ortiz's history of the 2nd Amendment aligns with the Black and indigenous scholars and activists who have aggressively pushed back against this refusal to face the truth of American history. Together they assert that the US was founded as a violent white supremacist society, and that what the nation and the world saw last Wednesday was a consistent expression of views and laws that have created and shaped the US since its foundation and through to the present.
  
  
  A side note:
  This isn't Dunbar-Ortiz's main point, but in discussing early American gun culture in the pre-Revolutionary War period, she answers a question I've always wondered about: Why were all these colonial-era VIPs surveyors? It's a weird job for a prominent person, because it's pretty dangerous work that takes them out of the political/social center of things for long stretches of time. Dunbar-Ortiz explains why: as planter/enslavers (like George Washington) exhausted the soil of the Southern Atlantic seaboard through capitalist monoculture, they needed new land. The legally settle-able land east of the Appalachian Mountains was already taken, so they needed to identify (via surveying) land west of there they could seize. The British government had promised this land to Indian nations and banned colonists from settling there in treaty agreements between sovereign nations that ended the French and Indian War. That's why George Washington was a surveyor: he was illegally scouting land to steal from indigenous people in order to develop it into plantations operated by people he enslaved. (Washington had also been a surveyor with the same goals before the French and Indian War, it just hadn't been explicitly illegal then.)
  
  The wider context for this, Dunbar-Ortiz explains, is that in throughout the mid 1700s colonists became increasingly angry that they were being prevented from stealing indigenous land, requiring Britain to station more troops in the colonies to keep the peace and prevent settler incursion into indigenous territory. To pay for this increased military presence, the British government raised taxes on colonists via the Stamp Acts, resistance to which was the immediate event that sparked the Revolution War. This is to say that--similar to the disingenuous argument often made that the Civil War was fought over states' rights rather than slavery, when the specific state right at stake was the right to own slaves--claiming that the Revolutionary War was fought over taxation/representation obscures the fact that taxation and representation as a way to control tax policy were symptoms of the larger struggle for land rights, specifically colonists' right to seize Indian land (in addition to the Eastern seaboard territories they already occupied).
• 
  Kyle Smith

  While very informative, some of the beginning chapters felt a bit disjointed, and it took a while for me to realize the argument the author was making. Still, a short, worthwhile read.
• 
  Katie ratherbereadinggg

  3.5
• 
  Robert

  Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz focuses on the cultural/political nexus that ties U.S. historical development together with the Second Amendment to the U.S. constitution.
  
  This is a polemical, scattershot and somewhat repetitive book that carries a heavy agenda, indicting the United States not only for being a gun-loving nation from the get-go but also for being genetically genocidal...accounting for the bond to guns, needed to carry out the genocide.
  
  There's a powerful argument here about Americans' willful blindness to their history of shooting their way from the east coast over the Appalachians into the Ohio Valley across the Mississippi across the Rockies and right up to the Pacific. Along the way and afterward, Americans seized indigenous peoples' lands, put down slave revolts, chased runaway slaves, stole half of Mexico, drove the Spanish out of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, trampled Central America, and conducted well-known operations in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
  
  Dunbar-Ortiz doesn't argue that all this mayhem flowed from the Second Amendment. Rather, she traces the lineage of armed exceptionalism from the Massachusetts Bay Colony through the creation of militias during the colonial period to their continuation via the Second Amendment, somehow landing in the laps of sovereign, God-blessed, American individuals whose, in the main, last vestige of true political power lies in the romantic fantasy of always being free as long as they could shoot.
  
  To underscore the real life corruption of reality that gun-based fantasy generates, Dunbar-Ortiz notes the highly peculiar cultural celebration (in movies, books, and song) of local Confederate militia/murderers like ... name your favorite gunfighter. Jesse James? The Younger brothers? One way or another, Dunbar-Ortiz associates them with the white supremacism we see still vital today...saw it on Ruby Ridge...saw it in Oklahoma City...saw it in Charleston...saw it in Charlottesville.
  
  She persuasively points out what many of us already know: the U.S. is a bizarre country. Its exceptionalism in terms of guns is stunning. There are 300 million plus guns in the U.S. just in civilian hands. We don't all have a gun, but we could. In fact, the average gun owner possesses something on the order of eight.
  
  The fundamental point of this book is that our cultural/historical origins and land-greed generated the Second Amendment as a by-product. Yes, it has been distorted by the NRA and others, but there is no way to deal with it politically without first dealing with the enormity of the gun culture that, in fact, makes the NRA more powerful than its 30 million per annum lobbying budget makes it. And beyond the gun culture, you have the gun manufacturers and profiteers. According to her research, the U.S. has provided close to a million guns to elements of the Afghan government since 2001. The U.S. is by far the major weapons purveyor in the world.
  
  I came across this book when it was favorably mentioned in the New York Review of Books. Ultimately it is a pessimistic book, as testified by the national non-response to events like Sandy Hook. The point is that you can't lobby gun reform or control in a typical D.C.-effort and you certainly can't get rid of the Second Amendment...until you foment a counter-movement greater in passion and energy than that of American gun owners and sympathizers who in some ways, as Obama said, cling to their weapons as a final vestige of personal political power.
  
  A final, complicating point: Here and there Dunbar-Ortiz does sprinkle some material generated by what obviously is her opposition, notably a hunter's eloquent statement of need and fulfillment. Extrapolating from that, one might stop and consider the fact that a significant number of mass murderers we associate with the headlines about massacres were not hunters. Think of the Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Charleston, Ft. Hood, and Orlando killers. Human beings were their game, not deer.