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"When governments fear the people, there is liberty," reads the quotation. "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

The same quotation has been posted dozens of times in other readers' posts. Some readers worked to debunk it by mentioning Monticello.org, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation's website, which has a section devoted to "spurious" quotations that have been attributed to the third president of the United States. The website lists several variations of the quotation, featured on two pages, and says staff "have not found any evidence that Thomas Jefferson said or wrote" those words.

Many of these quotations are circulated and reposted on social media or appear in chain e-mails," he said via e-mail. "Every time I see one of these bogus quotes, I call it out as fake."

Anna Berkes, research librarian at the Jefferson Library, said there are extensive records of Jefferson's writings and communications. Just about every quotation from Jefferson can be documented somehow, she said.

The earliest reference to the "tyranny in government" quotation that Berkes has noted thus far is within a 1989 opinion-editorial about gun rights from The Orlando Sentinel in Florida. She said the first part of the section of the article where the quotation appears, which begins with "No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms," has been verified. But the rest of it has not been found in Jefferson's writings.

Berkes said there are often clues that help identify quotes from Jefferson, such as the vocabulary of his time and the typical sentence styles he used. Over time, Berkes added, a researcher gains a keen sense for these discrepancies; Jefferson composed mostly written communication rather than text meant to be spoken.

"Jefferson was very wordy, and a lot of the quotes I see are very snappy," Berkes said. "They sound like they were maybe composed by a 20th century speechwriter."