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    Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment
    Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment
    Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment
    Audiobook6 hours

    Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment

    Written by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

    Narrated by Laural Merlington

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    With President Trump suggesting that teachers arm themselves, with the NRA portrayed as a group of "patriots" helping to Make America Great Again, with high school students across the country demanding a solution to the crisis, everyone in America needs to engage in the discussion about our future with an informed, historical perspective on the role of guns in our society. America is at a critical turning point. What is the future for our children?

    Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, is a deeply researched-and deeply disturbing-history of guns and gun laws in the United States, from the original colonization of the country to the present. As historian and educator Dunbar-Ortiz explains, in order to understand the current obstacles to gun control, we must understand the history of U.S. guns, from their role in the "settling of America" and the early formation of the new nation, and continuing up to the present.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 6, 2018
    ISBN9781977384300
    Author

    Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

    Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University. She is author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. She grew up in Oklahoma. During the 1960s, she took part in the antiwar movement and became a member of the militant feminist organization Cell 16. She later joined the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council in 1974. Her first book, The Great Sioux Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux Nation and its Struggle for Sovereignty, was published in 1977. Since then, she has written extensively on the topics of indigenous struggles for self-determination and territorial politics, notably in her autobiographical trilogy.

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    Reviews for Loaded

    4/5

    47 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Well-researched, but in some ways falling into a rhetorical trap of leftist dogma before snapping back into balanced and academically critical analysis. It is an odd whiplash at points, but not so terrible to warrant not reading the book. Fantastic work overall.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      An unsettling account of the history of the United States and its use of violence with guns. It strips away the mythology to offer us a glimpse into the rotted underbelly of genocide. I cannot recommend this book enough in understanding U.S. gun culture and its roots.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 2/5
      I think that she covers a lot of valuable history regarding guns and the second amendment and their usage in America as a tool of oppression, but ignores the fact that tools do not have ideology, those that use them do; and does not attempt to address this in her conclusion. I would recommend this book for a brief American gun history from 1000 feet up, but I would not recommend it if your goal is to arm yourself with more intimate knowledge of how the “other side” perceives firearms rights or water tight arguments against gun ownership.

      She attempts to associate American gun culture with white supremacy for the entirety of the book. She fails to point out that the inequity of gun rights is not a result of guns themselves but white supremacy exercising the exclusive access to guns, such as the FBI’s war against the black panthers and the massacre at wounded knee. She also overlooks the vast majority of gun control legislation and America’s history of inefficiency in defining and controlling guns, such as US v Miller.

      She goes so far as to make the claim that guns rights activists fail to support mental health and gun safety policy as an alternative, which is a gross misrepresentation of most pro gun positions. This would be fine with me if she didn’t spend the first portion insisting on her ability to relate to pro gun activism. There is no need to provide both sides of an argument in my opinion, but it’s odd not to when she had attempted to establish her credibility as someone FROM the other side. She also quite hilariously mentions anarchist attachment to gun rights as a fascist leaning, I suppose as an outcome of her dogma that guns=white supremacy. I don’t really take someone seriously who is under the impression that anarchism and fascism have anything in common.

      I don’t take issue with her assessment of the history of American gun culture as an arm of murderous, supremacist policy, but I think she does a poor job of exploring the history of guns as the tool of the oppressed as well here in America, which in my opinion would have been a much more fascinating and explorative analysis than her simplistic foundation. That foundation being that if guns were used to found a colonial state, than guns must be inherently colonial, which in my opinion is the logical equivalent of framing shirts as communist, as they were necessary for the function of the Soviet Union.

      I’ll probably return to this review and give it a few edits, but I would recommend this book for its historical overview of guns, and a better understanding of a liberal perspective. I would not recommend it if you’re interested in the complex history of the second amendment, as the analysis is anything but complex, and makes no attempt to explore the moral gray area of firearm ownership.

      1 person found this helpful