A New History of the 2A, White Settler Violence & Native Americans, R. Dunbar-Ortiz
Last edited Fri Jun 14, 2019, 05:04 PM - Edit history (1)
- "Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment," by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Kirkus Book Review, Oct. 2017.
KIRKUS BOOK REVIEW. A provocative cultural analysis arguing that the Second Amendment and white supremacy are inextricably bound. Though some argue that the Second Amendment is necessary to protect the “right to bear arms” for hunters and other law-abiding citizens, Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, 2014) maintains that the “well-regulated militia” has been the crucial element all along. This has given rise to many malicious groups, including slave hunters, the Ku Klux Klan, and white nationalists intent on race war as well as “seasoned Indian killers of the Revolutionary Army and white settler-rangers/militias using extreme violence against Indigenous noncombatants with the goal of total domination.”
It may sound extreme, but the author’s historical research provides strong support for her argument that gun love is as American as apple pie—and that those guns have often been in the hands of a powerful white majority to subjugate minority natives, slaves, or others who might stand in the way of the broadest definition of Manifest Destiny.The author’s analysis encompasses the growth of the arms industry, the embrace of the Western outlaw mythos, and the controversy over the Second Amendment itself, which was paid “little attention” until the second half of the 20th century, when civil rights, war protest, and rising crime rates increased the call for gun control. .https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/roxanne-dunbar-ortiz/loaded-dunbar-ortiz/
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- "The Colonial Roots of Gun Culture." The Origins of U.S. Gun Obsession Lie in the Violent Dispossession of Native Americans, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, In These Times, March 2, 2018. EXCERPTS:
Gun-love can be akin to non-chemical addictions like gambling or hoarding, either of which can have devastating effects, but murder, suicide, accidental death and mass shootings result only from guns. While nearly anything may be used to kill, only the gun is created for the specific purpose of killing a living creature. The sheer numbers of guns in circulation, and the loosening of regulations on handguns especially, facilitate deadly spur-of-the-moment reflex acts.
Seventy-four percent of gun owners in the United States are male, and 82 percent of gun owners are white. The top reason U.S. Americans give for owning a gun is for protection. What are the majority of white men so afraid of?
But, what colonists considered oppressive was any restriction put on them in regard to obtaining land. In the instances of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, the War of Independence itself, and many cases in between, the settlers’ complaint was the refusal of the British colonial authorities to allow them to seize Native land peripheral to the colonies.Taking land by force was not an accidental or spontaneous project or the work of a few rogue characters. Male colonial settlers had long formed militias for the purpose of raiding and razing Indigenous communities and seizing their lands and resources, and the Native communities fought back.
Virginia, the first colony, forbade any man to travel unless he was “well armed.” In 1658, the colony ordered every settler home to have a functioning firearm, and later even provided government loans for those who could not afford to buy a weapon. These types of laws stayed on the books of the earliest colonies and were created in new colonies as they were founded. The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, enshrined these rights and obligations as constitutional law: “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.” The Second Amendment thus reflects this dependence on individual armed men to take and retain land.
The continuing significance of that “freedom” specified in the Bill of Rights reveals the settler-colonialist cultural roots of the U. S. that appear even in the present as a sacred right. Settler-militias and armed households were institutionalized for the destruction and control of Native peoples, communities and nations. With the expansion of plantation agriculture, by the late 1600s they were also used as “slave patrols,” forming the basis of the U.S. police culture after emancipation...More, https://inthesetimes.com/article/20946/settler-colonialism-second-amendment-guns-white-supremacy-slavery
- "The Brutal Origins of Gun Rights." A new history argues that the Second Amendment was intended to perpetuate white settlers' violence toward Native Americans. By Patrick Blanchfield, The New Republic, December 11, 2017. EXCERPTS:
..As the writer and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues in her brilliant new book, "Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment," America’s obsession with guns has roots in a long, bloody legacy of racist vigilantism, militarism, and white nationalism. This past, Dunbar-Ortiz persuasively argues, undergirds both the landscape of gun violence to this day and our partisan debates about guns.
A distinguished scholar of Native American history, she pointedly notes, at the time of the Second Amendment’s drafting, other lines elsewhere in America’s founding documents already provided for the existence of formal militias, and multiple early state constitutions had spelled out an individual right to bear arms besides. What the Second Amendment guarantees is instead something else: “the violent appropriation of Native land by white settlers … as an individual right.”
Our national mythology encourages Americans to see the Second Amendment as a result of the Revolutionary War—to think of it as a matter of arming Minutemen against Redcoats. But, Dunbar-Ortiz argues, it actually enshrines practices and priorities that long preceded that conflict. For centuries before 1776, the individual white settler was understood to have not just a right to bear arms, but a responsibility to do so—and not narrowly in the service of tightly regulated militias, but broadly, so as to participate in near-constant ad-hoc, self-organized violence against Native Americans.
“Settler-militias and armed households were institutionalized for the destruction and control of Native peoples, communities, and nations,” Dunbar-Ortiz writes. “Extreme violence, particularly against unarmed families and communities, was an aspect inherent in European colonialism, always with genocidal possibilities, and often with genocidal results.” Although the U.S. Constitution formally instituted “militias” as state-controlled bodies that were subsequently deployed to wage wars against Native Americans, the voluntary militias described in the Second Amendment entitled settlers, as individuals and families, with the right to combat Native Americans on their own.
Dunbar-Ortiz traces the common image of the gun-bearing hunter to the folk-hero image of Daniel Boone, the frontiersman whose exploits in Kentucky were the stuff of legend even during his lifetime in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Yet, as Dunbar-Ortiz observes, Boone’s celebrity was largely the work of another man, John Filson, a real estate speculator who wrote under Boone’s name. He simply wanted to encourage settlers to buy claims over land that was already heavily populated by Native Americans. So much for the image of the rugged American frontiersman, gun in hand, experiencing his primordial oneness with the wilderness, so beloved by gun rights advocates...https://newrepublic.com/article/146190/brutal-origins-gun-rights
- Virginia colonists shoot at Native American's during Bacon's Rebellion in 1676.
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