evidence: In June 2024, Snopes received an email from a reader asking about a quote purportedly originating from Founding Father and third U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson. The reader's email displayed a quote meme posted on X by @SunIslandMusic in November 2023 claiming Jefferson once said, "The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it." The meme displayed a watermark for an online user with the handle @ChristiChat. [...] On Oct. 14, 2010, Anna Berkes, a manager for public services and collections development with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, published a page about the quote on the foundation's website, Monticello.org. Berkes wrote, "We currently have no evidence that Thomas Jefferson said or wrote, 'The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it' or any of its listed variations." The only variation of the quote Berkes mentioned on the page read, "The people will not understand the importance of the Second Amendment until it is too late." We located other similar variations in several sources but none of them credibly linked the quote to Jefferson.