The "Liberty Teeth" Speech by "George Washington" -- "Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence. The church, the plow, the prarie wagon, and citizen's firearms are indelibly related. From the hour the Pilgrims landed, to the present day, events, occurrences, and tendencies prove that to insure peace, security and happiness, the rifle and the pistol are equally indispensable. Every corner of this land knows firearms, and more than 99 99/100 percent of them by their silence indicate they are in safe and sane hands. The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference; they deserve a place with all that's good. When firearms, go all goes; we need them every hour." -- falsely attributed to George Washington, address to the second session of the first U.S. Congress. This quotation, sometimes called the "liberty teeth" quote, appears nowhere in Washington's papers or speeches, and contains several historical anachronisms: the reference to "prarie wagon" in an America which had yet to even begin settling the Great Plains (which were owned by France at the time), the reference to "the Pilgrims" which implies a modern historical perspective, and particularly the attempt by "Washington" to defend the utility of firearms (by_use_of_statistics!) to an audience which would have used firearms in their daily lives to obtain food, defend against hostile Indians, and which had only recently won a war for independence. The "99 99/100 percent" is also an odd phrase for 18th century America, which tended not to use fractional percentages. It's clear that "Washington" is addressing "gun control" arguments which wouldn't exist for another couple of centuries, not to mention doing so in a style that is uncharacteristic of the period, and uncharacteristic of Washington's addresses to Congress, both of which exhibited a high degree of formality. This is a false quote, but bits and pieces of it still continue to crop up from time to time. Most recently, this quote has been seen circulated on flyers at gun shows attributed to Neil Knox's Firearms Coalition, but Knox isn't the original source of this "speech," and even national publications, such as _Playboy_magazine, have been snared by it. ("Playboy_ published the "quote" in December 1995 as part of an article entitled "Once and for All: What the Founding Fathers Said About Guns". After consulting with an assistant editor of the George Washington Papers at the University of Virginia, "Playboy_ published a lengthy correction in March 1996.)