James Madison did not say this:

This quotation was popping up more and more before the massacre of schoolchildren in Connecticut. It is false. I checked. In fact I checked a lot of places but you know how the internet can be. It does not matter how much gun maniacs jump up and down, hold their breath, or any other juvenile tactic; James Madison did not say this.

I already took two of these misattributions to task earlier and am utterly tired of trying to play referee between heartless, sociopathic ideologues and the gullible, scared white man-children they prey on. I hate writing about this, but it is a compulsion just as is the knee-jerk defense by gun nuts to possess assault weapons. The truth, that is what interests me. Simply pulling a quote out of thin air and dumping into an extremely touchy debate is not helpful.

Now, the first thing about this picture is that the text is embedded which makes it more difficult to extract and search for. Therefore, someone inclined to believe this quotation without critical examination can just pass it on without a second thought. Someone not so sure would have to take the extra step to type it out. When first searching for the source of this quotation, I found this blog post that contained no citation. From February 2009, the gun nuts were already shitting themselves about the black man coming to take their phallic symbols. Okay, next stop was one of those quotation generator/aggregators, still no source citation. [sidebar, I could not get the homepage of liberty tree.ca to load, therefore I was unable to find out anything else about it] The quotation brings back 1.16 million hits on google, don't worry I don't have the patience to investigate every cut-and-paste job on every chatroom any more than you have the patience to read about them. How about just one. Notice the immediate use of ad hominem, slippery slope, straw man, and red herring fallacies after firing this fabricated quotation.

Finally we come to the James Madison Research Library and Information Center, where things get somewhat tricky. Apparently this thing is brand new, but of course stinks to high hell. The home page contains an attempt to sound academic and respectable... written by wayne lapierre. Just another shill for the nra, an almost transparent con to put the founding fathers' stamp of approval on the out of control gun lobby. Anyway, here's what ol' wayne and friends did to fix the blatant misattribution:

"The Constitution preserves "the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation...(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." (James Madison of Virginia, The Federalist, No. 46)
"The right of the people to keep and bear...arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country...." (James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434 [June 8, 1789])
"Americans have the right and advantage of being armed ― unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." (The Federalist, No. 46 at 243- 244)
"Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.... Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." (The Federalist, No. 46)
"It is not certain that with this aid alone [possession of arms], they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to posses the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will, and direct the national force; and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned, in spite of the legions which surround it." (The Federalist, No. 46)
 

 Funny that all but the second entry comes from one essay in the Federalist Papers in which Madison conducts a thought experiment to disprove the contention that a strong federal government will necessarily lead to tyranny (after all, that was the entire purpose of the Federalist Papers, a PR campaign to ratify the contstitution). Indeed, the words do appear in Federalist 46, doctored with ellipses and brackets in the nra's propaganda, but they are there nonetheless. The phrase repeatedly foisted upon the unsuspecting public... does not. Putting quotation marks around something means THE PERSON SAID EXACTLY THAT! Not close to that, not containing similar words to that, EXACTLY AS SPOKEN OR WRITTEN. So, anyone who used this cockamamie meme or quoted the Fourth President to rationalize and defend their fetish for weapons of at least medium destruction is A LIAR. Whether ignorant or not, they are lying.