Every day, the Daily Dot finds something that people on Facebook are sharing and, in turn, shares it with you—with a little explanation. Here’s today’s share.
Why let the truth get in the way of a good story about a gun-toting granny?
Many Facebook users—48,000 and counting—are sharing a scanned photo of a newspaper clipping that tells a tale of a batty old woman, who, upon spying some men leaving a parking lot in her car, pulled a gun and forced them out. Only once she tried to fit her key in the ignition did she realize it was the wrong car.
Despite the story’s disclaimer that it’s “a true account recorded in the Police Log of Sarasota,” its details are suspect. Since the men were already driving away when she stopped them, did she have to remove their key before she tried inserting her own? If they had hot-wired the car, wouldn’t it still be running when she sat down in the driver’s seat?
A telephone operator at the Sarasota Police Department, who requested her name not be used, told the Daily Dot, “I’ve worked here for 30 years and have never heard that. It sounds like a joke.”
Snopes categorizes the story as one of many urban legends of gun-toting grannies.
A version of the story was published in a newspaper in a 1998 Dear Abby column, and it’s been passed around online in its present form since at least 2001, according to Snopes.
That means that what Facebook users are currently passing around is a scanned newspaper reprint of an online urban legend that evolved out of a 14-year-old newspaper column.
Photo from gcfairch