In Other Words
Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
“Up to 1975, The NRA had not opposed gun regulations and had not made a fetish of the Second Amendment. It had been founded following the Civil War by a group of former Union Army officers in the North to sponsor marksmanship training and competitions,” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes in Loaded, her new deep dive into the origins of the Second Amendment. “In 1934, during the Depression, the NRA testified in favor of the first federal gun legislation that sought to keep machine guns way from outlaws, such as the famous Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd, and Chicago gangsters. During testimony, a Congressman asked the NRA witness if the proposed law would violate the Constitution, the witness said he knew of none.”
That NRA came to a halt in the late 1970s when Harlon Carter, a former Border Patrol chief — the one who oversaw the “Operation Wetback” mass deportation in the 1950s — seized control of the organization in an internal coup. For Dunbar-Ortiz, it’s no coincidence that the NRA’s pro-assault weapon radicalization would come at the hands of someone who devoted his professional life to fortifying the U.S.-Mexico border through migrant deportation. In her historical retelling of the Second Amendment as it was utilized throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, her conclusion is that the constitutional right was largely a legal tool used to arm white settler militias to kill Native Americans and appropriate their lands, in addition to a lethal legal instrument of slave patrols.
In other words, our culture’s constitutional commitment to carry weapons in public originates out of the violence of Southern slave states, as well as their land-seizing wars against Indians. If anything, groups like the NRA offer a fig leaf of “the individual hunter” to the naked historical reality of the amendment as a locked-and-loaded form of white settler supremacy. The Second Amendment’s appearance in the Bill of Rights, the author surmises, originated out of an existing Virginia colony law that allowed setters to form militias to fight Native Americans for their land and control both enslaved and free blacks.
As early as 1705, the colony of Virginia had established mandatory armed slaved patrols, imposing stiff fines on white men who refused to serve. As a rule, white men were required by law to carry guns to school, work, and church in the service of these goals. Dunbar-Ortiz’s isn’t the only history to argue that “the amendment gave slavers the power to organize voluntary militias to help enforce slavery.” But as a reader, I’m not sure how to connect this history thread to our present-day debate about guns, whose fault lines largely seem brokered less around race and more about whether carrying guns makes you safer or makes public areas more deadly.
Our culture’s constitutional commitment to carry weapons in public originates out of the violence of Southern slave states, as well as their land-seizing wars against Indians.
Dunbar-Ortiz tries to make the connection through some statistics. (According to the book, 74 percent of gun owners in the U.S. are male and 82 percent of gun owners are white; 61 percent of all adults who own guns are white men.) She tries some myth-busting as well, noting how pro-slavery Confederate guerrilla leaders like Jesse James were recast and sanitized as gun-toting outlaws.
But her best argument about why, as a nation, we persist in defending unfettered, individual gun ownership, is deeply personal. In her introduction, she reveals that she was once an open-carry gun owner, who cleaned, practiced, and shot with her 9mm Browning automatic nearly every day during a brief spell in the early 1970s. Why? Her rather innocuous women’s study group in New Orleans had been infiltrated; police took photographs of their meetings and death threats were phoned in. As a result, the ladies of this nonviolent feminist peace studies group took up shotguns with a zeal that surprised themselves.
“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,” Dunbar-Ortiz writes. But before long, the group had “a closet full of guns” that they spent hours every day breaking down, cleaning, and polishing between practice rounds at the gun range. “We had fallen under the spell of the guns,” she adds.
She proffers “the spell” as an excuse, but it seems that she’s on the verge of an argument. Maybe there really is a gun lust — and like other lusts, it’s irrational, unyielding to logic, and openly contemptuous of popular opinion. If so, that theory might go toward explaining why gun rights and gun owners, despite comprising a minority of the population, have been so vocal and so deeply effective in staking out their position. — Casey Sanchez