Fact Check: It's Claimed Jefferson Once Said 'Beauty of 2nd Amendment' Is It's Not Needed 'Until They Try To Take It.' Here's the Truth

Jordan Liles

June 14, 2024 at 10:00 p.m.·3 min read

Claim:

Thomas Jefferson said, "The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it."

Rating:

In June 2024, Snopes received an email from a reader asking about a quote purportedly originating from Founding Father and third U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson. The reader's email displayed a quote meme posted on X by @SunIslandMusic in November 2023 claiming Jefferson once said, "The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it." The meme displayed a watermark for an online user with the handle @ChristiChat.

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A June 2024 search of Facebook and X found numerous users recently reposting the same quote with Jefferson's name. Former U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn also reposted the quote on X in 2021, at a time when he was serving the state of North Carolina's 11th Congressional District.

No Evidence

However, no documentary evidence exists of Jefferson saying or writing the words in the quote.

On Oct. 14, 2010, Anna Berkes, a manager for public services and collections development with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, published a page about the quote on the foundation's website, Monticello.org. Berkes wrote, "We currently have no evidence that Thomas Jefferson said or wrote, 'The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it' or any of its listed variations."

The only variation of the quote Berkes mentioned on the page read, "The people will not understand the importance of the Second Amendment until it is too late." We located other similar variations in several sources but none of them credibly linked the quote to Jefferson.

'To Paraphrase Thomas Jefferson'

The oldest mention of the exact quote in a search performed on the newspaper-archiving website Newspapers.com displayed a result from 1994 in the South Carolina newspaper The Greenville News.

On April 12, 1994, The Greenville News printed a letter from a reader named Gregg Styles. At the end of his letter, Styles wrote, in part, "If the American people allow our Constitutionally protected freedoms to be stolen behind the disguise of a 'Crime Emergency,' we will live to regret it. The warning bell is ringing. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, 'The beauty of the Second Amendment is, it will not be needed until they try to take it.'"

In other words, it's possible the quote simply originated in a "letters from readers" newspaper column as a supposed paraphrase of an unknown and unconfirmed Jefferson writing. We were unsuccessful in our attempt to find a way to contact Styles.

For further reading, we previously published a report looking at another fake Jefferson quote about firearms. We also reported the facts behind a popular meme about other purported quotes from three Founding Fathers – Jefferson included – and author Thomas Paine, titled, "D*mn Those Pesky Facts."

Sources:

Berkes, Anne. "The Beauty of the Second Amendment...(Spurious Quotation)." Monticello.org, 14 Oct. 2010, https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/beauty-second-amendmentspurious-quotation/.

Saidi, Nicole. "Did Jefferson Really Say That? Why Bogus Quotations Matter in Gun Debate." CNN, 11 Jan. 2013, https://www.cnn.com/2013/01/11/opinion/jefferson-fake-gun-quotation/index.html.

Styles, Gregg. "Letters from Readers: War Waged against Private Ownership of Firearms." Newspapers.com via The Greenville News, 12 Apr. 1994, p. 4, https://www.newspapers.com/image/199692843/.

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No Evidence

'To Paraphrase Thomas Jefferson'

Sources:

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