Loaded Quotes

“The United States was founded as a capitalist state and an empire on conquered land, with capital in the form of slaves, hence the term chattel slavery; this was exceptional in the world and has remained exceptional. The capitalist firearms industry was among the first successful modern corporations. Gun proliferation and gun violence today are among its legacies.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment

“1970, at the time of my own gun phase, the then-celebrated U.S. historian Richard Hofstadter coined the term gun culture. “Many otherwise intelligent Americans cling with pathetic stubbornness to the notion that the people’s right to bear arms is the greatest protection of their individual rights and a firm safeguard of democracy—without being in the slightest perturbed by the fact that no other democracy in the world observes any such ‘right’ and that in some democracies in which citizens’ rights are rather better protected than in ours, such as England and the Scandinavian countries, our arms control policies would be considered laughable.”3”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment

“The astronomical number of firearms owned by U.S. civilians, with the Second Amendment considered a sacred mandate, is also intricately related to militaristic culture and white nationalism. The militias referred to in the Second Amendment were intended as a means for white people to eliminate Indigenous communities in order to take their land, and for slave patrols to control Black people.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment

“Washington and the other founders of the United States designed a governmental and economic structure to serve the private property interests of each and all of the primary actors, nearly all of them slavers and land speculators.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment

“It [this book] aims to confront the violence implicit in U.S. society from the moment of its conception, and the various narratives and forces that have taken shape to deny the consequences of that violence by popularizing and commercializing it.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment

“Violence perpetrated by armed settlers, even genocide, were not absent in the other territories where the British erected settler-colonies—Australia, Canada, and New Zealand but the people of those polities never declared the gun a God-given right; only the founding fathers of the United States did that. And the people of the other Anglo settler-colonies did not have economies, governments, and social orders based on the enslavement of other human beings. The United States is indeed “exceptional,” just not in the way usually intoned by politicians and patriots.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment