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Power of the NRA: Mass Organization, JROTC

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Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second AmendmentROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ, rdunbaro@pacbell.net, @rdunbaro

Dunbar-Ortiz is author of the book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment

She said today: “The U.S. is unique in the industrialized world for the number of guns legally in civilian hands, although only a third of the population owns even one firearm. The average gun owner owns nine firearms. The NRA is not just a lobby, it is a mass organization with chapters in every state that are autonomous and have the power to negate election candidates who support gun control. Junior ROTC exists in nearly all middle and high schools, and the NRA furnishes free targets, firearms, and training. Nikolas Cruz, the shooter who killed 17 high school students in Parkland Florida in 2018 was an expelled student from the school and had been an avid member of the JROTC chapter in the school that practiced in the school gym. He was wearing his JROTC shirt when he carried out the shooting.”

See her pieces “Inside the minds of American mass shooters” for the British Guardian and “Settler Colonialism and the Second Amendment” for Monthly Review. Also, see a book talk carried by C-SPAN.

Her other books include An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States and, most recently, Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants’: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion.”