posted 10-24-2016 03:10 PM                  

"when government takes away citizens’ right to bear arms it becomes citizens’ duty to take away government’s right to govern."

Around the time of Washington’s 282nd birthday, a reader sent us the meme, which includes a painting of Washington and a quote purportedly written or uttered by the nation’s first president: "When government takes away citizens’ right to bear arms it becomes citizens’ duty to take away government’s right to govern."

But are those really Washington’s words?

We contacted Edward Lengel, editor in chief of the Papers of George Washington project at the University of Virginia. He said "there is no evidence that Washington ever wrote or said these words, or any like them." Lengel cautioned that it’s impossible to prove a negative, but he added that he’s "as certain as he can be" that the quote did not originate from George Washington.

This is not the first time a similar claim has popped onto our radar screen.

In December 2012, PolitiFact Texas rated False a claim made two days after the Newtown elementary school shooting. When U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, appeared on Fox News Sunday, he was asked why he believed ordinary Americans should be able to buy semi-automatic weapons designed for military use. Gohmert answered in part, "For the reason George Washington said a free people should be an armed people. It ensures against the tyranny of the government."

PolitiFact Texas contacted Gohmert’s office to seek details on the Washington quotation but didn’t hear back.

The closest statement they could find was one Washington made in his first State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1790: "A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined."

The academic consensus is that Washington was referring to a trained militia to defend the new nation, rather than anticipating citizens seeking to head off perceived governmental tyranny.

Ron Chernow, whose Washington: A Life won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for biography, told PolitiFact Texas that Washington was "talking about national defense policy, not individuals arming themselves, and the need for national self-sufficiency in creating military supplies."

Some post-Revolutionary lawmakers did expect citizens to own firearms, but Washington does not appear to have been among them, experts said.

"The idea of resistance to tyranny being dependent on a nation of gun-wielding individuals acting at their own behest or even on local initiative would have been anathema to Washington," Lengel told PolitiFact Texas. "Indeed, during the (Revolutionary) war he very frequently lamented the crimes carried out by armed civilians or undisciplined militia against their unarmed neighbors. The solution to these crimes, as he understood it, was to increase the power of the government and the army to prevent and punish them -- not to put more guns in the hands of civilians."

For More:http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/feb/20/facebook-posts/did-george-washington-offer-support-individual-gun/

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Tax cuts are the same as spending increases.

posted 10-25-2016 02:59 PM                  

"The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction." -- Henry St. George Tucker, in Blackstone's 1768 Commentaries on the Laws of England

"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right to bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of the citizen to bear arms is just one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible." -- Hubert Horatio Humphrey, 1960

"Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily lives, and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom." -- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

JFK Library : http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready -Reference/JFK-Quotations/Roosevelt-Day-Commemoration-Message.aspx

"I ask sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people ... To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them." -- George Mason (who opposed ratification of the Constitution without the Bill of Rights)
The James Madison Research Library and Information Center http://www.madisonbrigade.com/g_mason.htm

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed" -- Noah Webster
http://www.madisonbrigade.com/n_webster.htm

"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."
-- Mohandas Ghandi.

"And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms…" -- Samuel Adams, Debates of the Massachusetts Convention of 1788, printed in "Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts", at 86-87 (Peirce & Hale, eds., Boston, 1850)

"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military." -- William Burroughs (b. 1914) author, "The War Universe"
"And I certainly wouldn't want to live in one where the only people who HAD guns were the police, the armed forces and criminals." - Bert Rand

"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right – a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world." -- Abraham Lincoln, 1848 ... "And how does an unarmed people do that?" -- Rick Jennings

"Being unarmed, among the other harm it brings you, causes you to be despised." -- Niccolo Machiavelli

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." -- Plato (427-347 B.C.)

"Quemadmoeum gladis nemeinum occidit, occidentis telum est." ("A sword is never a killer; it is a tool in the killer's hands.") -- Seneca (Lucius Annaes Seneca "the younger", ca. 4 BC - 65 AD)

"He [Jesus] said to them, 'But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.' " (Luke 22:36)

"[A]ll power is inherent in the people ... it is their right and duty to be at all times armed," -- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Cartwright, 1824

"Only a government that does not trust its citizens would refuse them the right to bear arms." -- Curt Weldon

The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of the republic; since it offers a strong moral check against usurpation and arbitrary power of the rulers." -- Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1891

"My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed-where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once." -- Justice Alex Kozinski in his dissent on the case of Silveira v. Lockyer, United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, 2003

"If your most basic right is the right to life, then it seems obvious to me that you have the right to defend your life. Guns are, in this century, the most effective means of doing so - so effective that every genocide has only been carried out against victims who were disarmed by their governments." -- William G. Hartwell

"All too many of the other great tragedies of history -- Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few -- were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations."-- Justice Alex Kozinski, 9th Circuit Court of Appeals

"The Founding Fathers of the United States thought they had found a way to successfully head off the degeneration of governments into pathological monstrosities: ensure that the people remain armed, and teach them that it is part of their duty as free citizens to check the arrogance of government — by threat of armed revolt or by actual revolution, if need be. Thomas Jefferson would have asked why the Jews and Gypsies of Germany allowed themselves to be disarmed by Nazi gun-confiscation laws without rising in revolt — and, more pointedly, why the soi-disant civilized nations of the world did not see the confiscation of civilian weapons as a sure harbinger of the Holocaust to come." -- Eric S. Raymond

“I would never invade the United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.” -- Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Japanese naval forces and architect of the Pearl Harbor, Early in World War II

"...arms... discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. ... Horrid mischief would ensue were [the law-abiding] deprived the use of them." -- Thomas Paine

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms. . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." -- Jefferson's "Commonplace Book," 1774-1776, quoting from On Crimes and Punishment, by criminologist Cesare Beccaria, 1764

"Free men don't ask permission to bear arms." -- Glen Aldrich

and many many more
http://www.freedomkeys.com/r2kba.htm

posted 10-25-2016 03:20 PM                  

"The best we can help for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed."
Alexander Hamilton"

"The people are not to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them."
Zachariah Johnson

"Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence … from the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurences and tendencies prove that to ensure peace security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable … the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference — they deserve a place of honor with all that's good."
George Washington
First President of the United States