I stumbled into an interesting situation the other day while doing some research for a new essay on the absurdity of treating “freedom from fear” as a right (coming soon!).
I’ve seen this quote cited as from Lysander Spooner by several reasonable-looking sources:
“To ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the law abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless.”
But for my essay, I wanted to track down the original source in Spooner’s writing. And guess what?
I couldn’t find it.
I found some collections of Spooner’s work and did text searches of everything I could find, and it wasn’t there.
As I continued to look, I got more suspicious. The language was oddly modern for Spooner. Could it be a misquote?
It turns out that this quote is not by Spooner at all, but was written by Jeffrey Snyder about the 1994-2004 Assault Weapons Ban.
So, if you’ve used this quote, it may be time to update your citation. Apparently this is from an article that was in the American Rifleman and the Washington Times. Neither makes archives available that far back, so the best I could find is two sites that get the citation right.
Hat tip to Joe Huffman and the Weapons Education Forum for hanging on to proper citations.