ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ, rdunbaro at pacbell.net, @rdunbaro

Dunbar-Ortiz is author of the recently released Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. Last month, a talk about the book was carried by C-SPAN. Her previous books include An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.

She recently wrote the piece “Inside the minds of American mass shooters” for the British Guardian, which states: “Gun-love can be akin to non-chemical addictions like gambling or hoarding, either of which can have devastating effects, mainly economic, but murder, suicide, accidental death, and mass shootings result only from guns. …

“There were 127 mass shootings with 874 victims in the United States between 1966 and 2016, an average of seven deaths in each. Nearly all of them were carried out by white men.”Only three of the 130 shooters were women. If domestic shootings are included — meaning a man shooting his partner, often including their children and other relatives — the number of mass shootings rises dramatically.”

She also recently wrote the pieces “United States Policing and ‘Gun Rights’ Began With Slave Patrols” for TruthOut and “Settler Colonialism and the Second Amendment,” for Monthly Review, which states: “The violent appropriation of Native land by white settlers was seen as an individual right in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, second only to freedom of speech. Male colonial settlers had long formed militias for the purpose of raiding and razing Indigenous communities and seizing their lands and resources, and the Native communities fought back. Virginia, the first colony, forbade any man to travel unless he was ‘well armed.’ A few years later, another law required men to take arms with them to work and to attend church or be fined.”