The more we learn about the medical establishment's response to COVID-19, the less inclined I feel to take the words of doctors seriously.

That's a shame because most physicians had nothing to do with fabricating social distancing or masking children for absolutely no reason. They just want to help their patients live a happy, healthy life.

But that perception--one shared by a lot of people I've spoken with--isn't particularly helped when the White House tries to enlist doctors and hospitals to push to infringe upon our right to keep and bear arms, yet here we are just the same.

The White House is calling on hospital executives, doctors, and other health care leaders to take bolder steps to prevent gun violence by gathering more data about gunshot injuries and routinely counseling patients about safe use of firearms.

Biden administration officials are hosting back-to-back events Thursday and Friday at the White House for about 160 health care officials, calling gun violence a “public health crisis” that requires them to act.

The strategy also reflects a stark political reality: Congress has been deadlocked on most gun-related legislation for years, with a deep divide between Republicans and Democrats. If Democratic President Joe Biden wants to get anything done quickly, he will need to look outside the Capitol. He has already enlisted educators to talk to parents about safe gun storage and community workers to help at-risk youth.

“The president has been clear: This is a public health crisis. So, to solve it, we need the leaders from the health care sector,” Rob Wilcox, a deputy director of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, told California Healthline. “Those are the leaders that run the health systems and hospitals that we go to for treatment, and it’s those doctors, nurses, practitioners on the front lines.”

Health experts have long described gun violence as a public health crisis, one that disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic residents in poor neighborhoods.

The problem is that we already know that there is an issue with violent crime involving firearms. That's not exactly new and while this is supposedly about data, it's data that ignores a lot of aspects of the gun debate.

After all, will the hospital be able to differentiate between a person shot as an innocent bystander in gang warfare versus the hoodlum shot by a law-abiding citizen defending their life? Probably not.

One issue with the whole "public health crisis" thing is that doctors only see one side of things. They see the patients wheeled in, probably lacking any context at all for why the patient was shot--was it a gang fight, were they targeted by a criminal for something, were they shot buy a good guy defending himself, etc--and see the horrors of those wounds. They don't see the lives saved because someone had a gun in that moment.

And I think the White House knows this. They want that data in part to try and make the case that our rights are a public health issue and that we should forfeit them in the name of public health.

The thing is, we did that a couple of years ago and all we got was just as many people dead, if not more, and a wrecked economy that still hasn't recovered.

Why should anyone suspect that this time they'd get it right?

Especially when the people who represent the problem are the very people who aren't going to be impacted by any so-called public health measures involving firearms. 

Then again, these are some of the same people who quarantined the healthy, so we shouldn't be surprised.