IS KERMIT GOSNELL THE CHUCK'S GUN SHOP OF MEDICINE?

In certain corners of the Internet, today is Everyone Scold Liberals and the Media for Not Reporting on Kermit Gosnell Day. Gosnell is a doctor who's been on trial since mid-March on murder charges in connection with operations at his now-shuttered abortion clinic in Philadelphia -- which, if reports are to be believed was a slaughterhouse that no one, abortion supporter or critic, would defend.

Liberals and the media are being scolded because this trial hasn't become a national news story. Fox News Democrat Kirsten Powers got the ball rolling last night with a USA Today column, and now Atlantic libertarian Conor Friedersdorf follows up with "Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell's Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story."

What's alleged is pretty awful:

... this isn't solely a story about babies having their heads severed, though it is that. It is also a story about a place where, according to the grand jury, women were sent to give birth into toilets; where a doctor casually spread gonorrhea and chlamydiae to unsuspecting women through the reuse of cheap, disposable instruments; an office where a 15-year-old administered anesthesia; an office where former workers admit to playing games when giving patients powerful narcotics; an office where white women were attended to by a doctor and black women were pawned off on clueless untrained staffers. Any single one of those things would itself make for a blockbuster news story.

But there's more. Friedersdorf quotes from the grand jury report, which tells us that the Pennsylvania Department of Health inspected Gosnell's clinic in 1979, then not again until 1989.

Numerous violations were already apparent, but Gosnell got a pass when he promised to fix them. Site reviews in 1992 and 1993 also noted various violations, but again failed to ensure they were corrected.

But at least the department had been doing something up to that point, however ineffectual. After 1993, even that pro form a effort came to an end. Not because of administrative ennui, although there had been plenty. Instead, the Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all...

The claim is that political pressure protected this bad abortion provider. You know what that reminds me of? Virtually every government interaction with a bad gun dealer anywhere in America in recent decades. Powers and Friedersdorf ask why the story of this clinic isn't national front-page news. I'd ask: Why aren't the stories of bad gun dealers front-page news?

Yesterday I told you that the gun shop where Adam Lanza's mother (legally) obtained firearms used by her son in the Sandy Hook shooting had lost its license. The shop had more than 500 violations. How many of those improperly conducted sales led to the death or injury of innocent people? Yet when a hearing was held on the shop's license last summer, it wasn't front-page news -- it wasn't news at all. It still wouldn't be news if the shop weren't linked to a massacre, which was probably the only reason the shop's license was revoked, despite those many violations.

I also told you about Chuck's Gun Shop in the Chicago suburbs, which, according to one study, is the source of nearly one out of every five crime guns in Chicago. Why isn't that national front-page news? Have you ever read a front-page story about legal proceedings against a gun dealer, no matter how many deaths may have resulted from the dealer's shady acts or corner-cutting?

No one in the pro-choice community would defend Kermit Gosnell. I don't know any pro-choicer who'd disagree with this 2011 column by Katha Pollitt, which enumerates many of the horrors of Gosnell's clinic and defends abortion rights.

By contrast, the gun community does everything in its power to enable bad gun dealers to keep dealing guns. Hey, Kirsten and Conor, that could be a front-page story in America every day.