Everyone in America not living under a rock has heard of Adam Lanza. Kermit Gosnell? Not so much.

The reason is obvious. Adam Lanza’s rampage accrues to progressive ambitions of gun “control,” or as those in California more than willing to sign a petition to outlaw guns and confiscate them from law-abiding citizens reveals, the attempt to toss the Second Amendment on the ash heap of history – absent the “messy” amendment process outlined in the Constitution.

Toward that end, progressives will use the corpses of 20 dead schoolchildren from Newtown as stage props, telling their fellow Americans that “something must be down now!” or we will all bear the burden of Adam Lanza’s depravity. In short, you either buy into some progressive version of gun control, or you become accomplices to Adam Lanza’s crime.

The Whitehouse.gov website makes this equation clear. “While no law or set of laws will end gun violence, it is clear that the American people want action. If even one child’s life can be saved, then we need to act,” the statement reads. “Now is the time to do the right thing for our children, our communities, and the country we love.”

The parents of the dead children were also turned into tools of the progressive agenda. The president saw fit to fly them to Washington, D.C. aboard Air Force One to ratchet up pressure on those Senators who might still have some peculiar affinity for protecting Constitutional rights. One parent, Francine Wheeler, whose 6-year-old son, Ben, was among the 20 children killed, was given the opportunity to speak to the nation, when the president turned over his weekly address to the grieving mother. The Washington Post made sure no one could misinterpret what that effort was all about. “Wheeler’s remarks are a heart-wrenching capstone to a week of intense lobbying in Washington by parents of children slaughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary School,” the paper reports.

Yet as a tragically minuscule number of Americans are aware, some heart-wrenching stories are “more equal” than others. This brings us inexorably to Kermit Gosnell.

Gosnell is a 72-year-old abortionist on trial for the murder of seven babies born alive, as well as 41-year-old Karnamaya Monga, who died following a botched abortion procedure. In a column entitled “What I Saw at the Gosnell Trial,” J.D. Mullane reveals that what happened at this clinic – or more appropriately, this human abattoir – “is beyond any morbid Hollywood horror.” “Tiny severed feet and hands stored in jars over a sink in the ‘procedure’ room,” and babies who survived an abortion, only to have their spinal cords severed and their brains removed by suction were, “placed in a waste bin for disposal,” he reports.

That procedure was referred to as a “snip,” a label designed to obscure to horror that the American left routinely papers over with words such as “reproductive freedom” and “choice.” National Review’s Andrew McCarthy pulls the verbal curtain away from this particular euphemism:

“In a ‘snip,’ the abortionist, sharp scissors in hand, grasps the squirming and sometimes squealing baby he has just delivered. He stabs the child in the back and then, snapping the blades, severs the spinal cord from the brain,” writes McCarthy. “(Stephen Massof, one of Kermit Gosnell’s fellow butchers) described the snip as ‘literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.’”

McCarthy also relays the testimony of a nurse who explains the “dilation and evacuation” (D&E) procedure that becomes necessary once the first trimester abortion procedure, known as “suction curettage,” as in vacuuming the “clump of cells” from the womb, can no longer be used. Of the 1.2 million abortions that took place in 2008, 121,000, or 10 percent, occurred in the the second trimester, weeks 13-26. Here’s what those women have experienced, according to a nurse who witnessed one D&E:

After everything but the baby’s head had been delivered, “the baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall,” she testified. “The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp…He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used.”

At Gosnell’s trial one of those “pan babies” was state exhibit C-147. Mullane notes that the exhibit depicts “a large baby balled in the fetal position, bloody, stuffed in a bin. ‘Big enough to walk me home,’ joked Gosnell when he saw the child’s remains, testified Ashly Baldwin, a clinic employee.”

In a mainstream media culture, where “if it bleeds it leads” is the First Commandment, covering this trial would seemingly merit similar, if not equally relentless, coverage given to the Newtown atrocity. Yet it has not, for one simple reason:

The ideological bankruptcy of the American left must be protected at all costs.

It is a bankruptcy so overwhelming, the same media that have managed to cover every detail of Adam Lanza’s crime, his motivations, the anguished reactions of the victims’ parents, and the subsequent clarion call for gun control – aided and abetted by that same media – cannot bring itself to explore the horror house known as the “Women’s Medical Society.”

The most pathetic excuse for such a glaring double-standard was offered by the Washington Post‘s health policy reporter, Sarah Kliff, who gave coverage to the Sandra Fluke controversy, the Todd Akin controversy, and the controversy surrounding the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which was brow-beaten into reversing its decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. Kliff, who covered the other three stories extensively, explained that she covers “policy for the Washington Post, not local crime.”

The beheading of babies is a “local crime,” but coverage of a whiny Georgetown student who wanted government-subsidized birth control, a stupid Congressman’s rape theories, and a funding controversy is “policy.” You know what else are “local crimes?” Newtown, Aurora and Virginia Tech.

In a column ripping the lack of coverage, liberal journalist Kirsten Powers, one of the few progressives with an ounce of integrity, noted that the Washington Post “has not published original reporting on this during the trial and The New York Times saw fit to run one original story on A-17 on the trial’s first day. They’ve been silent ever since, despite headline-worthy testimony,” writes Powers.

Powers’ column was published April 11. The New York Times broke its silence on the issue – sort of – with an editorial published for its Sunday Review. In what is best described as an act of sophomoric defiance designed to offset the Gosnell story, the Times offered up “Courage in Kansas.” The editorial sings the praises of a new abortion clinic opened up in Wichita, nearly four years “after an anti-abortion extremist opened fire and killed a Wichita abortion provider, Dr. George Tiller, as he stood in the foyer of his church,” further noting that the development “is both inspiring and instructive.” “Dangerous and unconstitutional legislative restrictions, unceasing harassment, threats of violence and fearful doctors having to hide their identities for self-protection: this is what it means to be on the front line of trying to deliver legal and necessary reproductive health care to women in Wichita and other parts of the country where zealous right-wing politicians and activists on the political fringe currently hold sway,” contends the Times.

Zealous right-wing politicians and activists on the political fringe currently hold sway? Gosnell’s clinic has been open for 30 years in a country where left-wing zealots have convinced millions of women that abortion – at almost any time and for any reason – is no big deal.

Yet in truth, the Gosnell case is about infanticide, not abortion. What a media blackout suggests is that progressives are mortally afraid that the line between abortion and infanticide is so blurred, a lot of Americans,who would be repelled by the details of this case, might not see any line at all. As I mentioned in my last column, a representative from Planned Parenthood couldn’t see it. When asked by a Florida politician what should happen to a baby born as the result of a botched abortion, Alisa LaPolt Snow thought that any decision about it “left up to the woman, her family and the physician.”

Adam Lanza did not grow up in a vacuum. He was marinated in the same despicable culture as the rest of us. It is the one where life is exceedingly cheap, and the ludicrous promise of the pro-abortion crowd that the procedure would be safe, legal and rare, has devolved into an orgy of self-gratification, where abortion on demand is exactly that, no questions asked. And while Americans have been essentially called to duty by progressives who demand gun control, using the deaths of 20 children as a springboard, the nearly 60 million children aborted since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land is nothing more than business as usual. Yet if the same 10 percent aborted by the D&E procedure in 2008 is consistent on a yearly basis, as many as six million babies have been eliminated by severing their heads from their bodies and sucking out their brains, since the Supreme Court discovered that such a procedure constituted a “right to privacy.”

Undoubtedly, much of this reality would be thrust front and center if the Gosnell case received the kind of media treatment it deserves. The bone-chilling details of exactly what happens when a “woman’s right to choose” is exercised would no longer be buried under the plethora of euphemisms progressives use to obscure reality. Someone might even mention that a woman’s right to choose begins with the first choice, as in refraining from irresponsible sex that may lead to unwanted pregnancy. That choice is rarely mentioned these days if it’s mentioned at all – because we have devolved to the point where a majority of Americans apparently believe we must do everything to accommodate irresponsible behavior, not eliminate it.

Make no mistake: the atrocity allegedly perpetrated by Kermit Gosnell is every bit as horrifying as the one committed by Adam Lanza. Innocents had their bodies mutilated, even as their lives were taken from them. Yet for our utterly corrupt media and their progressive allies, the Gosnell story is one atrocity too many, because it could be the same kind of game-changer regarding abortion progressives are desperately hoping Newtown will be regarding gun control.

And so the media will stay away, making sure as many Americans as possible never hear about what really goes on at an abortion clinic. Despite what the New York Times and other progressives believe, there is nothing remotely “courageous” about it.