Loaded. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
up in a current of repression and paranoia. One or two or three pale blue New Orleans police cars parked across the street from our building every day. The cops took pictures, and a suspicious, unmarked car with Illinois plates followed us. Older local activists told us the cars’ occupants were “red squad” detectives from the Chicago Police Department. We installed a heavy lock on the flimsy wooden door to our run-down building, but we did not feel safe.
After a week of heavy police surveillance, we began receiving telephone calls from a man claiming to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The man threatened to burn down our building, and, of course, we didn’t trust the police, so we did not report it. Instead, 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. We knew that law enforcement authorities would think twice about attacking us if they knew we were armed. In reality, we were joining a trend occurring in movement groups across the country at that time, and once armed, our mindsets changed to match the new reality.
Two of us drove across the Lake Ponchartrain Causeway to a gun show that was held weekly in a large tin shed on the Slidell fairgrounds. The pickups and vans of traveling gun dealers, with license plates from a dozen states, were parked around the site; I had a cousin in Oklahoma who made his living selling guns that way. Inside the shed, the scene was festive, like any ordinary weekend craft fair or flea market. There were children running and playing, older women sitting on folding chairs visiting with each other, younger women clutching infants and staying close to their men, vendors hawking wares and bargaining, Confederate battle flags waving. Everyone was white. We had no trouble finding the used 9mm automatics we sought. We chose three used Brownings for $100 each, clips included, and a case of military surplus ammunition.
“We’re looking for a shotgun, too,” I said to the dealer.
“For protection or duck huntin’?” the vendor asked.
“Protection.”
He offered us a Mossberg 500 12-gauge police special riot gun, with a short barrel.
“Isn’t it illegal to have this weapon?” I asked.
“Ain’t a sawed-off, legal as taxes.”
We bought it, along with some buckshot shells, all for cash. No paperwork required. The man who sold us the guns also had for sale a number of swastikas in various forms—pins, arm patches, photographs.
We went to the Tulane Law Library to research Louisiana gun laws and found that there were no gun laws in Louisiana. The only restriction was against building an arsenal—defined as more than twenty automatic or semiautomatic weapons—for illegal purposes. Carrying concealed and loaded weapons within the state with no registration was entirely legal. Federal laws prohibited transporting firearms across state lines for sale or to commit a crime, possession of stolen weapons, removal of serial numbers, and various foreign weapons, such as the AK-47.
We kept the loaded shotgun at the door, and we joined an indoor shooting gallery at Lafayette Square. We practiced with the Brownings every day. Shotguns weren’t allowed at the shooting club, but a shotgun took no skill to fire, only nerve and a steady shoulder. Soon after, we acquired rifles and joined a rifle club in the West Bank area. We loaded the bed of our station wagon with four M-1s, a Winchester .22, a .30-30 with a scope, and the riot shotgun, all purchased at the gun shows in Slidell. We paid for membership in the National Rifle Association and affixed their red and black emblem to the back window of the car. Cops were known to not stop vehicles with the stickers, although that probably didn’t work for African Americans.
We acquired more small arms and went daily to the Lafayette Square pistol shooting gallery to practice. In addition to the Brownings, we now owned a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .357, an S&W long-barrel .38, a Walther PPK 9mm, a Colt .45, and a Beretta .32 automatic. We’d purchased all the weapons legally and anonymously at gun shows. We soon had a closet full of guns, plus our new shotgun reloading equipment and a 100-pound bag of gunpowder.
We spent hours every day breaking down, cleaning, oiling, and polishing our weapons. We took turns loading shotgun shells. We had fallen under the spell of guns. Our relationship to them had become a kind of passion that was inappropriate to our political objectives, and it ended up distorting and determining them.
Knowing that the FBI intercepted our mail, and wanting to inform authorities that we were fully armed, I wrote to my father about my new hobbies—guns and gunsmithing. Ironically, it seemed the first thing I’d done in my life that he really understood and supported.
“When you can shoot a squirrel in the eye with a .22 at forty yards on the first shot, you’ll be a shooter,” he wrote.
He must have been pleasantly surprised, because he knew that as a child I was terrified of his Remington .22 rifle and shotgun; I got it from my mother, who hated guns. I never asked her why, but she put the fear and hate in my sister and me. Notwithstanding her objections, my two older brothers followed our father. At adolescence, each one started hunting and brought home game, which was our major meat item. We were poor, and ammunition was expensive, so they all had to be good shots, practicing on bottles and cans with BB guns for years before they handled real firearms. It was all for hunting, practical, but there was that other element I could detect but not explain, until I fell in love with guns.
Gun-love can be akin to non-chemical addictions like gambling or hoarding, either of which can have devastating effects, mainly economic, but murder, suicide, accidental death, and mass shootings result only from guns. Guns are made for killing, and while nearly anything, including human hands, 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. The Trace, a nonprofit news organization focused on gun violence found that cases of road rage involving a firearm have more than doubled in two years, from 247 in 2014 to 620 in 2016. Research from Gunwatch suggests that “more guns in more cars may simply equate to more road rage incidents in which a gun was brandished, or fired.”1
At the time of my gun-love, which lasted about two years in the early 1970s, approximately half of all homes in the United States contained a weapon—112 million in total—but nearly a half century later, only a third of households contained firearms, which sounds like progress.2 Yet the number of guns privately owned in the United States had reached more than 300 million, a number equal to the total population. The reality is that in the early twenty-first century, each gun owner possessed an average of eight guns.
It seems that our group, and others, during the years that the Vietnam War was playing out live on our televisions, were in the vanguard of a trend of owning multiple weapons. Army and Navy surplus clothing accompanied the trend, which was soon replaced by sweatshop-produced camouflage garb to meet consumer demand. Something else was also at work, which will be probed in the following chapters.
In 1970, at the time of my own gun phase, the then-celebrated U.S. historian Richard Hofstadter coined the term gun culture. “Many otherwise intelligent Americans cling with pathetic stubbornness to the notion that the people’s right to bear arms is the greatest protection of their individual rights and a firm safeguard of democracy—without being in the slightest perturbed by the fact that no other democracy in the world observes any such ‘right’ and that in some democracies in which citizens’ rights are rather better protected than in ours, such as England and the Scandinavian countries, our arms control policies would be considered laughable.”3
Hofstadter narrates the historical roots that might explain the violence wrought by civilian gun use, but argues that other European countries were surely as violent. In one brief paragraph, he dismisses the Second Amendment as having any validity in constitutional law: “By its inclusion in the Bill of Rights, the right to bear arms thus gained permanent sanction in the nation, but it came to be regarded as an item on the basic list of guarantees of individual liberties. Plainly it was not meant as such. The right to bear arms was a collective, not an individual, right, closely linked to the civic