Jefferson Never Said It

"When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

Those are supposedly the words of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence. The saying has appeared recently on many blogs and Facebook pages (including my own), and is used by gun lovers to try and convince Americans that Thomas Jefferson would have opposed current efforts to restrict the easy availability of guns. There is only one problem with that. Jefferson never said it.

That's the conclusion of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation on their website Monticello.org. That site says their staff "Have not found any evidence that Thomas Jefferson said or wrote" those words. One research librarian for the Jefferson Library (Anna Berkes) said the earliest reference she can find for the quote is a 1989 article on gun rights in The Orlando Sentinel. She has not been able to find it among Jefferson's writings. She also went on to say that Jefferson's style was very wordy and that this quote, like other spurious quotes attributed to Jefferson "sound like they were maybe composed by a 20th century speechwriter".