Florida 'PolitiFact' Shows its Bias on Gators and Guns

A recent article by a person on a web site misnamed "PolitiFact Florida" did some interesting checking of a claim in the current debate about allowing people with concealed carry permits to carry on Florida campuses, as they do in most other places in Florida.  As part of the testimony for the bill, Florida Students for Concealed Carry made the following claim:

"According to the state of Florida, you are almost twice as likely to be attacked by an alligator than by someone who happens to carry a conceal-and-carry permit."

PolitiFact Florida's Amy Sherman decided to check out the claim.  I think she did a pretty good job of checking.  She found that there were no good figures for the number of "attacks" by people with concealed carry permits, but there were numbers for alligator bites and for revocations of permits based on misuse of firearms, and that gator bites were more common than revocations of concealed carry permits for misuse of firearms.  As "attacks" by a concealed carry holder would likely be some subset of "misuse" it appears that she discovered that the fact was mostly true.  She writes:

But overall, alligator bites happen more often than the revocation of gun permits for misuse of firearms.

That is when she goes all politically correct and comes up with exactly the opposite conclusion:

 We find the statement has an element of truth but ignores other information that would give a different impression. So we rate it Mostly False.

Factoids such as the above are used by all political groups to give flavor and context to their arguments.  I would think that a website that is supposed to check facts would be concerned with well, facts, rather than determining that a fact does not agree with their overall impressions.

But maybe PolitiFact Florida really isn't all that interested in facts, but in pushing their own political agenda.   PolitiFact Florida.com is owned and operated by the Tampa Bay Times.  Three days before Amy Sherman reached for her "mostly false" opinion, the Tampa Bay Times published an editorial positon against the campus carry bill:

 The effort to replace the freshman beanie with a Beretta is the handiwork of the National Rifle Association, which apparently won't be content until every Floridian is allowed to drive to the convenience store in a Toyota pickup truck fitted with a .50-caliber machine gun.

Observers might be excused for wondering if the editorial position of her paper might influence Amy Sherman's rating of the facts.

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