What is it with gun people and misattibuted or fabricated quotations?

These two pictures and quotations are making the rounds of gun rights people. We get it. You guys like your guns, fine and dandy. Why do you insist on making up quotations and attributing them to famous people?

Factcheck.org had this to say about our great adversary of the Pacific war:

Advocates of gun rights often argue that in World War II Japan was deterred from invading the U.S. mainland by a fear of American citizens with guns in their closets. They frequently quote Japan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto as saying: "You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass."
But this quote is unsubstantiated and almost certainly bogus, even though it has been repeated thousands of times in various Internet postings. There is no record of the commander in chief of Japan’s wartime fleet ever saying it.
How do we know? We contacted Donald M. Goldstein, sometimes called "the dean of Pearl Harbor historians." Among his many books are "The Pearl Harbor Papers: Inside the Japanese Plans" (1993) and the best-selling "At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor" (1981). He is a professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. He told us the supposed Yamamoto quote is "bogus."

It should be noted that Yamamoto was actually assasinated by the US Army Air Force when his transport plane was intercepted by P-38 Lightnings. Maybe it is irony, maybe just coincidence that this is exactly what US high command feared about invading Japan and why we dropped the atomic bomb instead. And exactly what happened when we invaded and occupied Iraq. Partisan or irregular warfare can sometimes drive out an occupying force, for example Yugoslavia during WWII. The price was incredibly high for the Slavic peoples, the nazis had a policy of executing 10 civilians for every German soldier killed or maybe more, and may not have worked if the Wehrmacht had not been stretched so thin fighting the Russians etc.

I regretfully imagine that our would-be Wolverines would be enthusiastically willing to sacrifice 10 "useless eaters" in their battle against the invading horde. Like ayn rand and the train wreck, the gun maniacs like owen robinson are of the mindset "sucks to be you libs, you should have stockpiled weapons and ammo like the real men."

Actually, there are lots of scary stories floating around the right-wing fever swamps about guns that factcheck tries to clear the air on. Fat lot of good it will do.

This one's a little more dumb. Especially when you look at the quotation at the bottom supposedly uttered by Thomas Jefferson. I know the picture is cut off but I think it says "Peace is that brief glorious moment in history when everybody stands around reloading." [I had to upload a new picture, sorry the original disappeared down the memory hole]

Seriously... they buy this.

Beyond the usual suspects, it seems marines are really into our third president and his stands (supposedly) about the second amendment. Putting aside the fact that TJ was a slaveowner and certainly had no issue with "abridging the rights of [black] people to bear arms." An odd choice to hang your hat on. But Monticello has no record of the master ever uttering these words. I personally am much more acquainted with George Washington's writings and admit that I was suprised to see that the left-wing icon Noam Chomsky misattributed several TJ quotations himself, or simply made them up the way he manufactured a right-wing Truman, Kennedy, and Carter.

The moral I guess is that gun maniacs are not just physically cowards but know their position is so weak that they must make things up to rationalize why they want to kill people with such reckless abandon.