Even liberal and progressive culture, such as antiwar activist singers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, bought the misleading narrative, beginning the process of turning ex-Confederate soldiers and their cohorts into aspirational folk heroes. From song to book to visual media, problematic and violent figures like these had their stories rewritten to embody the frontier spirit of American entrepreneurship and expansionism that created the country we find ourselves in today. Unpacking the history of the modern lone wolf, white, male shooter requires deconstructing the stories of many of America’s beloved Wild West figures, like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, whose gangs and lives of gun crime have now become the stuff of legend. And as gun culture became normalized, so were the stories of these early white male settler-colonists who braved hostile territories armed to the teeth ostensibly to cleanse the soil of native and black people, leading to the lone-wolf archetype we fear today. From civilian militias in guerrilla warfare to slave patrols, the Ku Klux Klan, and much later rifle clubs and associations like the NRA, the Second Amendment’s provision for Americans to bear arms has been one of the main driving forces of the bloody foundation of this country. Dunbar-Ortiz’s thesis is a close reading of the language of the Second Amendment in the historical context it is rarely placed in: She claims that the original purpose of militias was the extermination of indigenous populations and next the terrorizing and murder of freed black slaves.
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