Another False Meme About Guns

Apparently, there is a meme moving around the inter webs that states that George Washington said the following words...

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

As Politifact accurately notes, there is no evidence that he ever said these words. Now, what Washington did say was this...

"A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined." (State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1790)

Further...

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."

Most interesting...