We know that academia rolls hard left in most spheres, which means they tend to embrace leftist dogma. That generally includes gun control, as we’ve seen so many times in the past.

The anti-gun slant we’ve seen from college campuses and faculties has been disconcerting, especially when they hide behind the veneer of neutrality, that they’re just following data.

They’re not. They’re constructing studies to reach preconceived results.

And the announcement of a new journal is likely to ramp that up to 11.

The US doesn’t have a gun violence epidemic – it has gun violence epidemics, plural, with wide variation in the types and severity of the problem across states and cities which in turn have a confounding array of regulations and laws in place regarding firearms.

It’s an area of policy which combines public health, constitutional law, and partisan politics, presenting a unique challenge for lawmakers, researchers, health professionals, and members of the public who seek to understand the issues involved.

Now, for the first time, a major American social science journal has devoted a special issue to the unique complexity of gun violence and gun safety, edited by two UConn faculty members along with a colleague at Johns Hopkins University.

The special issue of the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science – edited by Kerri Raissian, associate professor in the School of Public Policy; Jennifer Necci Dineen, associate professor in residence in the School of Public Policy; and Cassandra Crifasi, associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins – offers up-to-date research examining policies that work to reduce gun violence, as well as policies that don’t. The goal of the journal – access to which is free in perpetuity, a rarity among academic journals – is to suggest ways forward for research, policy, and practice that rely on scholarship and evidence-based reasoning.

Now, you tell me, what are the odds of there being a single pro-gun study in that entire issue?

What we’re seeing isn’t likely to be an unbiased, balanced look at the issues surrounding guns. What we’re going to see is page after page of anti-gun screed pretending to be research. We all know it. I think, on some level, they know it as well.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’ll actually put in some effort to get some degree of neutrality, balancing pro-gun findings with anti-gun findings.

And then again, David Hogg might denounce gun control and run for president of the NRA.

I mean, sure, why not?

What’s worse, though, is that this journal will be held up as some academic masterpiece and that we should all heed the findings of our technocratic betters.

This will become a bludgeon with which gun control advocates will try to assault the pro-gun position, all while pretending they have arguments that aren’t based on emotion.

The push we’ve been dealing with? It’s about to get pushier.

So dig in and get ready, because we’re going to see things get interesting from here on out.