Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment

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.

"From an eminent scholar comes this timely and urgent intervention on U.S. gun culture....a high-impact assault on the idea that Second Amendment rights were ever intended for all Americans. A timely antidote to our national amnesia about the white supremacist and settler colonialist roots of the Second Amendment." Caroline Light, author of Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense

"Loaded recognizes the central truth about our 'gun culture': that the privileged place of guns in American law and society is the by-product of the racial and class violence that has marked our history from its beginnings." Richard Slotkin, author of The Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America

"Her analysis, erudite and unrelenting, exposes blind spots not just among conservatives, but, crucially, among liberals as well....As a portrait of the deepest structures of American violence, Loaded is an indispensable book." Patrick Blanchfield,The New Republic

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She is the author of many books, including Outlaw Woman, a memoir of the 1960s and her time in an armed underground group, and the acclaimed An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. She lives in San Francisco.