A Misfire on the Second Amendment

There are about 850 million privately held firearms in the world and Americans own nearly half of them. We are ten times more likely to die from gun violence than residents of other high-income countries. Shootings are so common in the United States that they have reduced overall life expectancy within our borders by nearly a full year since 2000. Like most gun statistics, this one is even more shocking when broken down by race. White Americans own guns at markedly higher rates than other groups, yet they have only lost half a year of life on account of firearm assaults. African Americans have lost nearly three and a half years. Other statistical chasms are even wider and crueler. The odds that a black child will be murdered with a gun are double those of Native American children, quadruple those of Hispanic children, and more than ten times those of white and Asian-American children. National firearm legislation could begin to address gun violence, violence that disproportionately afflicts people of color. For more than a generation the Republican congressional caucus, currently 93.6% white, has refused to let such legislation pass. Gun culture and gun violence are complicated topics. But neither can be understood without accounting for white supremacy. In this country, gun politics are also race politics.¹

Readers who want to explore that connection are more likely to turn to journalists, activists, legal thinkers, sociologists, or scholars of public health than to historians. While armed violence is easy enough to find in the historical literature, few people in the profession put guns at the center of their work. Those scholars who do seldom focus on the link between guns and racial inequality. Indeed, historians have lately had as much to say about firearms as tools to resist racial oppression as instruments for imposing it.²

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's learned, strident, and flawed book centers what most histories of guns marginalize. Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment identifies settler colonialism and slavery as the parents of our distinctive national gun culture. Drawing on John Grenier's explication of the "first way of war," Dunbar-Ortiz describes a colonial military tradition that normalized the destruction of villages and food stores, and that justified spectacular violence against indigenous noncombatants. When armed white men killed Native people or terrorized them off their lands, they also crafted and reinforced racialized narratives of savagery vs. civilization. This practical and discursive military tradition and the land hunger that underwrote it only accelerated after the Revolution, propelling white men with guns on a blood-soaked migration across the continent. Relying on the work of historian Sally Hadden, Dunbar-Ortiz tells a parallel story about arms and the white exploitation of black bodies. From the policing mandated by early colonial slave codes to the institution of slave patrols throughout the South in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, chattel slavery only worked so long as it was protected by white men with guns. The legacy of the slave patrol, she tells us, stretches from the Klan through modern-day police violence against black men.

Loaded turns next to guns in popular culture. How, it asks, did Confederate guerrillas morph into heroic western outlaws in twentieth-century pop fiction, music, and movies? Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger turned Jesse James into Robin Hood; Joan Baez and Johnny Cash crooned the lost cause in "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down;" John Wayne's ex-Confederate proved his true grit; and Clint Eastwood redeemed the Outlaw Josie Wales. These and other songs, books, and films extended a process of redemptive transformation begun in the nineteenth century, driven by popular culture and imperial war-making. Dunbar-Ortiz explains that the hunter occupies a different position in American gun culture than the outlaw, but one that has been comparably mythologized. Glorified in tall tales about Daniel Boone, James Fenimore Cooper's iconic Natty Bumppo, and Teddy Roosevelt's paeans to hardy men...