Loaded A disarming history of the Second Amendment

In his trenchant analysis of the Second Amendment, Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States) avoids a legalistic approach and eschews the traditional view that links the amendment to citizens' need to protect themselves from a tyrannical government. Instead, she argues that the Second Amendment was passed to facilitate the genocide of Native Americans in order to steal their land and to provide a means for slaveholders to control their human property. She supports her thesis with numerous examples of atrocities directed at Native Americans in the late 18th and 19th centuries, and notes that "slave patrols" were used to capture runaway slaves and bolster power among slave owners. To Dunbar-Ortiz, the Second Amendment is a reflection of an American gun culture that has countenanced genocide, slavery, and a scourge of civilian-perpetrated mass murders in the modern era. Though she acknowledges that there is "no way to prove a correlation between war-related crimes and domestic mass shootings," she believes that Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and other similar tragedies are the predictable dark shadow and "domestic expression" of what historian Andrew J. Bacevich dubbed "the new American militarism." Dunbar-Ortiz's argument will be disturbing and unfamiliar to most readers, but her evidence is significant and should not be ignored. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States) is unequivocal in her interpretation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; she argues that arming citizens to protect themselves from despotic government was not its historical premise. Relying on the work of historians and authors, she also emphatically contends that the "Right To Bear Arms" is rooted in the interests of early American colonists overtaking Native American lands and defending themselves against slave rebellions. This notion of the "Right To Bear Arms" has continued as an American tradition, she maintains, in the forms of racial injustice, the continued suppression of marginalized peoples, and the U.S. desire for empire. In her view, a number of American icons-including Daniel Boone, Theodore Roosevelt, and George Washington, among others-are part of the unjust tradition of the Second Amendment. For Dunbar-Ortiz, domestic mass shootings in the United States are also in the same tradition as American foreign military operations, as they relate to the slaughter of innocents. Verdict Readers interested in a different view of U.S. history and the Second Amendment will find this book appealing.-Mark Jones, Mercantile Lib., Cincinnati © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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 (what one source dubs "rahowashort for racial holy 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 pieand 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 United States is not unique among nations in forging origin myths," writes Dunbar-Ortiz, "but only one of the few in which its citizens seem to believe it to be exceptional by grace of the Creator, and this exceptionalist ideology has been used to justify genocide, appropriation of the continent, and then domination of the rest of the world." 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. This compact manifesto won't convince everyone, but it presents a formidable argument.A radical revision of American history, specifically as it relates to its persistent gun culture. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.