Truth Index: Have Fact-Check, Will Travel

Note: The original post from July 24 has been deleted and this is a revision. In review I was not happy with my wordy diary of how I tallied the gun rulings. This post skips all that.

With the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado, PolitiFact has looked at its database on the now news worthy subject of guns and gun control. PolitiFact's Bill Adair writes in a recent article that they’ve “checked 74 claims on the subject of guns.”

His write-up looked at it in terms of the less positive rulings over the history of PolitiFact. Here’s a different look at it: more recent claims, both sides, and the full Truth Index for that period.

I came up with 40 “gun” rulings since 2011. That’s roughly the “second half” of PolitiFact’s “guns” database . Here is the Truth Index and breakdown for those 40:

Click to enlarge:  More recently "rulings on guns" have improved slightly, with only 30%  less than Half True.

As can be seen overall, however, 45% (compared to Adair’s 42%) of the rulings were True and Mostly True, and the overall Truth Index was an almost zero, but still in positive territory, 1.25. A Truth Index close to zero is the equivalent of an equal number of rulings in all categories except Pants on Fire. Accounting for the heavier weight of the negative rulings, it’s “above average.”

Democrats can be attributed for 18 of the rulings and had a Truth Index of +19.4 while Republicans made up 21 of the rulings with a Truth Index of -14.3 (the remaining ruling was a statement by the Police Chief of Milwaukee found Half True, for whom I could not find an affiliation). The divergence between Democrats and Republicans is comparable to the average divergence for the top ten most popular subjects, and is similar to that for rulings on the economy, elections issues, and the deficit (post forthcoming).

PolitiFact (Bill Adair) reported on the worst of the worst, most of the PolitiFact rulings which signified “Falsehoods and Half Truths” as in the title, along with the ubiquitous Pants on Fire. But it seems to me this inadvertently makes the National Rifle Association (NRA) look bad by emphasizing its negative rulings. The other problem here is that, of the 12 rulings mentioned in the article, two were by Democrats (Obama and Biden) and the rest were by people/groups for which most were not assigned a particular affiliation, although one would know by the statement what their affiliation most likely is. While Ted Nugent is shown as “Republican from Texas” (sure glad it isn’t Michigan), the National Rifle Association is only described as “An advocacy group that fights restrictions on the right to bear arms.”   For obvious reasons, it was assigned a Republican affiliation for the purpose of this Truth Index calculation, as was its executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.

From the aspect that some people who may be pro-gun will likely accuse PolitiFact of liberal bias on reading this article, it needs to be pointed out that there have been some truthful claims made with regard to guns that PolitiFact has checked out. For example, PolitiFact Texas ruled True a statement by (Republican) state senator Jeff Wentworth in February, 2011, that only 2 percent of Texas' 25 million residents has a concealed handgun license. PolitiFact New Jersey ruled True a statement by (Democrat) Senator Frank Lautenberg in April that a “loophole allows individuals convicted of domestic violence to purchase guns.”

The National Rifle Association isn’t always fibbing: recently PolitiFact found True a statement about Obama “trying to slash funding for the Armed Pilots Program designed to prevent terror attacks." It was awarded a Mostly True by PolitiFact Wisconsin for an alert it published that said “Wisconsin’s concealed-carry permit rules require more proof than other states.”

So, Adair gets Mostly True on this one. His article “is accurate but needs clarification or additional information.” The Republican nature of the NRA was not clarified in their file; and while discussions about gun control may be filled with half truths and falsehoods, there’s also a large portion of mostly true and truthhoods that should be recognized as well.