The left is certainly guilty of ignoring gun or crime statistics they don't want to hear, but it's totally disingenuous to compare them to folks in the hard right-wing camp, such as fundamentalist Christians or the hardcore climate deniers.
All I know is that both of them are perfectly willing to discredit and throw science to the wind if it doesn't fit their needs. I hope the science community realizes this before they let themselves be used as pawns by politicians.
That is also a problem, but stems from a different cause. The right wing accepts the validity of the scientific method, but claims that biased left-wing scientists have intentionally published skewed results in a few limited areas like anthropomorphic global climate change. I don't agree with this interpretation and I think that climate change is the most serious threat to human civilization. But in countering destructive extremist movements from both sides it's important to understand the basis of their ideologies rather than just labeling them as "anti-science".
