Book review: Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Every once in a while, I take time out to review a book that I think is worth sharing. For anyone who has ever tried to understand the gun violence in the U.S.A., Loaded should be required reading. You would not think a book on this topic would be a pleasure to read, but brilliant history is. Dunbar-Ortiz presents a vital perspective on what makes the U.S. such an outlier among Western developed nations. While Australia is often cited as a similar country with a history of gun ownership (and settler violence against the indigenous population), only the U.S. has the Second Amendment to its Constitution: “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” That is what keeps the U.S. from addressing its problem in the way Australians have theirs.

I knew Dunbar-Ortiz was onto something right away. She immediately dispels a myth cherished by many gun-control advocates: that the Second Amendment isn’t, or wasn’t intended to be, about the individual’s right to own guns. Clearly it was. Dunbar-Ortiz takes us on a compelling journey through colonial and U.S. history, from Daniel Boone, James Fenimore Cooper, and Jesse James to David Koresh, Timothy McVeigh, and contemporary mass shooters. Who, like gun owners in the U.S., are and have always been overwhelmingly male and mostly white.*

Like other readers who have already posted reviews, I was uncomfortable with Dunbar-Ortiz’s observations at many points. But her evidence is undeniable. Although her critique is from the left, Dunbar-Ortiz confounds expectations from the first page. She relates how, in the early 1970s, she was part of a women's group that took up arms for self-protection and, even though they did not believe in armed struggle, fell “under the spell” of guns. She compares this addictive pattern of behavior to other non-chemical addictions such as gambling or hoarding—then makes the all-important point that is too seldom heard: Only guns are designed to kill. “[W]hile nearly anything, including human hands, may be used to kill, only the gun is created [and marketed, and sold] for the specific purpose of killing a living creature.” (pp. 14-15)

Dunbar-Ortiz, of part Native heritage, grew up in a tenant farming family in Oklahoma. Her father and brothers’ hunting was their main source of meat, and she is not a critic of hunting. Rather, her argument is that “the right to bear arms” was never about hunting. This is so obvious when you look at U.S. culture, especially from the outside: Violence is such a pervasive and glorified part of our history. My family never had guns, even cap guns, but I nevertheless grew up imagining riding around with a gun as the way a hero behaved. Most movies and video games are U.S. in origin and so, naturally, are most violent ones.

Gun deaths are the most awful domestic manifestation of an exceptional culture of violence in the U.S. that is hard to deny. Of the 37,000 Americans shot to death in an average year, two-thirds are suicides, and of the remaining homicides about 1,000 are by police. I’ll give my own examples: Four U.S. heads of state have been shot to death, not to mention attempts and assassinations of many other public men. I have seen gun-rights advocates point out that there are at least ten countries in the world proportionally more violent than the U.S.A., including Yemen. Is that what we aspire to—not being Yemen?

The U.S. is and always has been a highly militaristic culture. No doubt other Western countries support their troops and honor their veterans, but in the U.S. this takes on a quasi-religious character; questioning the wars themselves means being unpatriotic. Dunbar-Ortiz shows how the Army of the United States evolved in the Indian Wars, with irregular settler fighters—armed civilians—in the vanguard. In parallel, U.S. policing developed along with slave patrols, civilian “militias” that rode around enforcing slave behavior at gunpoint. When we look at the killing and mass incarceration of black men today, it is not merely linked to slavery as in one more injustice against African Americans; it is baked into U.S. institutions.

Dunbar-Ortiz again surprises by resisting “racism” as an explanation for all this violence. Rather, she, and her evidence, show that the normalizing of violence, in “savage wars”** against “savages,” became part of what it meant to be a white American man. The colonists and settlers were armed to fight against indigenous people, whose land they were taking by force, and because the war was savage it meant noncombatants and food supplies (such as the buffalo) could be slaughtered routinely. The normalized violence became part of U.S. identity and so fueled race hatred, rather than originating from it. 

At this point, if not before, a white U.S. person like me tends to say “Hey, I agree that institutionalized violence was really bad, but I didn’t do it!” And we are right. No one living can be blamed for the genocide of Native peoples or for slavery, any more than young Germans can be blamed for the Holocaust, or young Cambodians for the Khmer Rouge. In an earlier book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz wrote: “The late Native historian Jack Forbes always stressed that while living persons are not responsible for what their ancestors did, they are responsible for the society they live in, which is a product of that past. Assuming this responsibility provides a means of survival and liberation.” But how do we do this?

Loaded is not prescriptive, although its author does make one recommendation: work for implementation of the International Arms Trade Treaty, to which the U.S. is a signatory. She does not think changing U.S. laws is a sufficient solution to gun violence. Something much more fundamental is required: to become a different type of society than we have been. I believe that this is possible for Americans to achieve (a leftist author might take exception to my exceptionalism here). But it will take a great deal more repentance, as in “turning again,” from violence and rapacity than our society currently seems to be interested in. Dunbar-Ortiz was raised Southern Baptist; she would know what I mean.

The only thing that stops me giving Loaded five stars is that it sometimes reads as if it was rushed into print. More than a few sentences really need a comma for clarity, if not a verb! These editing errors do not reflect flaws in Dunbar-Ortiz’s scholarship, but the book would be better without them.

Understanding what the Second Amendment was for means we can no longer look at it as a sacred part of the Constitution, but more like the three-fifths clause, the compromise around slavery that was eliminated from the Constitution along with the abomination itself. Gun-rights advocates are correct about the Second Amendment’s link to government tyranny—British tyranny over what Indian land colonists could or could not take. But most don’t admit, even to themselves, the white supremacist context of that link. As long as we continue to talk at cross purposes about the Second Amendment, about philosophy or hunting, the bodies of men, women, and children will continue to pile up, just as they have since colonial times.  

*Of Americans who owned guns as of 2013, 61% are white men, which is almost double their proportion of the U.S. population. 

**Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. New York: Basic Books, 2002.