Loaded. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
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
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
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.