https://newrepublic.com/article/146190/brutal-origins-gun-rights
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These early cases of gun violence belong to a history of settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing. As the writer and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues in her brilliant new book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, America’s obsession with guns has roots in a long, bloody legacy of racist vigilantism, militarism, and white nationalism. This past, Dunbar-Ortiz persuasively argues, undergirds both the landscape of gun violence to this day and our partisan debates about guns. Her analysis, erudite and unrelenting, exposes blind spots not just among conservatives, but, crucially, among liberals as well.
These days, debates over the Second Amendment invariably turn on interpreting the connotation of “militia” in the stipulation that: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Liberals will often argue that gun ownership was always intended to be tethered to participation in institutions like the early Colonial Army or today’s National Guard. Conservatives tend to retort, in so many words, that “the people” were always meant to have guns as such, since an armed citizenry functions as a putative check on tyrannical government over-reach. When polled, a majority of Americans say they believe the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms, regardless of participation in formal militias, whether “for hunting” or, as the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 District of Columbia vs. Heller, for lawful “self-defense.”
A distinguished scholar of Native American history, Dunbar-Ortiz dismisses these debates as a red herring. As she pointedly notes, at the time of the Second Amendment’s drafting, other lines elsewhere in America’s founding documents already provided for the existence of formal militias, and multiple early state constitutions had spelled out an individual right to bear arms besides. What the Second Amendment guarantees is instead something else: “the violent appropriation of Native land by white settlers … as an individual right.”
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.”
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Since there has been a persistent case made over the last ten years in the wake of school shootings and gun violence more generally to push for gun control in general and also question the legitimacy of the Second Amendment this is an interesting argument. Most arguments against the Second Amendment tend to focus on its perceived irrelevancy to the present rather than arguing it was drafted with inherently racist motives in the past,, let alone with a proposal that it was designed with an agenda that would allow the liquidation of Native Americans.
But still ... if we have what Coates has called the first white president, if we have a police system in place that with disturbing routine kills citizens who are not even resisting but are merely perceived to be resisting, if wwe have a military industrial establishment as pervasive as we have ... if we have an administration that is regarded by people on the left and the liberal side of the American public as functionally already being fascist ... is now the best time to argue that the Second Amendment shouldn't exist because of a relatively new case that it was intended to enshrine anti-Native American murder? Not that I can't be sympathetic with such a reading, actually, it's just that this might be one of those books that would have been better timed for a different kind of administration.
3 comments:
That segment of the review doesn't point out the longstanding gun trade between Europeans and Indians, usually buying up furs/pelts and slaves. And in the mid eighteenth century, British colonists feared French traders, who would arm different Indian nations as a kind of permanent fifth column looming over the colonies. The same paradigm transferred to the newly independent Americans, who now feared the same thing among British traders. Of course, it's disputable whether such fears were even remotely based in reality, and whether the colonists caused many of their own problems. But, as you know, it's kind of silly to make the Indians into a passive and peace-loving people. Small nations, willing to ally with Europeans, bought up guns to defend and kill their aggressive, imperial neighbors.
And, it should be noted, that while Americans wanted to kill/defend from Indians, they probably also feared a standing army, which Hamilton was very much pushing for. Under the new Constitution, such was possible, and many anti-Federalist agitators still remembered Shay's Rebellion, among others, pretty vividly.
I don't think the book is ill-timed, it makes sense in its own echo-chamber type logic. The point is white racists, with their guns, threatening genocide. Never mind that it is the ex-military police, and not random neighbors, doing most of the killings (which you point out). Historians can (and do) behave like many other academic disciplines with a fading public star. They try to get the spotlight with outlandish and distorted claims, making themselves appear relevant. The rat-race is pretty pathetic.
PS. If you don't know, there was a funny event a few years ago where a Bancroft prize book (prestigious award in US history) was rescinded for forging evidence. What was his thesis? That the 2nd Amendment was only ever thought as a militia and it wasn't until the Civil War that there was a concerted effort to build a gun culture and individualize gun ownership. Many liberals loved the book, until the NRA-sponsored investigations proved he made up a lot of his quantifiable data. The book was called "Arming America", it has its own wikipedia page for its infamy.
I suppose it's true the review and the book have an echo-chamber consistency. There's a lot of stuff published at TNR that I find interesting not so much because it makes sense to me what an author may say but because it's interesting that it seems sensible to the author at the time of publication. I've seen folks with blue sympathizes freak out about our racist fascist president on the one hand yet still insist the 2nd amendment is stupid and evil and needs to be dropped. If that's what they think this is not the best timing for saying that one of the amendments in the bill of rights shouldn't exist while inveighing against Trump for being a threat to civil rights. But this is something where the people who are into that are probably at peace with the double standard there.
Yeah, the ex-military police and the overly militarized police force across the board are the more deeply pressing trouble. Even in a region as ostensibly liberal as Seattle police violence has been a point of controversy. It can be easy for people in the PNW to forget just how white supremacist the roots of these blue states are. Some things are, thankfully, better, but the shock that some had that racial animosity was here in the PNW in the wake of the Trump announcement was either deliberately naïve or so many people have come in from outside the PNW and have been so poorly educated on our regional history they don't understand that virulently racist sentiments have been here since the start of the white settlement of this region.
But then even less effort has been taken to highlight the tribal economy of slavery.
Now I totally did not know the story about the Bancroft prize!
The red and blue echo chambers stick with me a bit more this year since I saw people I used to see regularly on MH take to social media to dig their heels in for the DNC or GOP, often deciding to do so in reaction to whatever they felt was wrong at MH. It's reminded me of Ellul's warning that once people have been strongly shaped by propaganda in how they think and feel it's very, very hard nearing impossible for them to break out of that. There's a propensity to not break free from propaganda so much as to choose to double down on the propaganda of the team the subject chooses to convert to. So there's a bunch of true blue former MH people who don't seem to realize they didn't stop being cultish, they just switched cults. And ... then there's the Trump fans ... which has left me feeling like nobody learned jack if their response to what happened at MH is to double down on these kinds of echo chambers. :(
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