"America's Obsession With Guns Has Roots in a Long, Bloody Legacy of Racist Vigilantism, Militarism, and White Nationalism"

"Our national mythology encourages Americans to see the Second Amendment as a result of the Revolutionary War—to think of it as a matter of arming Minutemen against Redcoats. But, Dunbar-Ortiz argues, it actually enshrines practices and priorities that long preceded that conflict. For centuries before 1776, the individual white settler was understood to have not just a right to bear arms, but a responsibility to do so—and not narrowly in the service of tightly regulated militias, but broadly, so as to participate in near-constant ad-hoc, self-organized violence against Native Americans. 'Settler-militias and armed households were institutionalized for the destruction and control of Native peoples, communities, and nations,' Dunbar-Ortiz writes. 'Extreme violence, particularly against unarmed families and communities, was an aspect inherent in European colonialism, always with genocidal possibilities, and often with genocidal results.'"

At the New Republic, Patrick Blanchfield reviews Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment.