'Gun Lady' Carolyn McCarthy finally going home

MINEOLA, N.Y. – Early in her congressional career, Carolyn McCarthy's plea – rare in politics – was, "Let me go home!'' That is, pass gun control laws and let me retire, having done what I came to Washington to do.

Now, after 18 years, she finally is going home, back to the gray clapboard house where she grew up, settled after marriage, raised a child and received condolences after her husband was shot down in the 1993 Long Island Rail Road massacre.

But she goes home having accomplished almost none of what she hoped to accomplish when she first ran as a gun control advocate.

She did become a political celebrity: "the Gun Lady,'' the face of gun control in Congress. She did not get compulsory trigger locks or a renewed assault weapons ban. She never could close the gun show loophole in the background checks law or ban high-capacity ammo magazines.

And throughout her tenure in the House of Representatives, mass shootings like the one that got her into politics kept occurring, to little political effect. Public outrage subsided; bills died in committee.

McCarthy says, however, that the most horrifying of those shootings gave her the most hope – enough to help make her decide she could retire now, at 70.

Since the elementary school murders in Newtown, Conn., two years ago, she says, there are new voices advocating gun control, new unity in the movement and new progress on the state level – notably Washington State's passage last month of a background checks referendum.

There are other reasons for stepping back. Her "Gun Lady" persona became a flash point for gun rights groups; she was treated for lung cancer last year; and, especially after the shooting of her House colleague Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, "I was just starting to have a burnout.''

Each new mass shooting, she says, took a personal toll. Each revived memories of the LIRR incident; each elicited calls from journalists asking what she was going to do; each brought office visits from the latest victims' families, looking for a hope she was hard-pressed to offer.

"How do you explain to them that I've been doing this for 18 years?" she says. "As a common sense person,'' she adds, "I'm going, 'What am I doing wrong that I can't get my message across?'''

Maybe nothing. Maybe McCarthy's misfortune was to arrive in Washington at the moment when gun control was becoming the great lost cause of American politics.

LONG ISLAND BEGINNINGS

Sitting in the dining room where she planned her first campaign, Carolyn McCarthy seems like an older version of the petite, self-contained nurse who in 1996 decided to run as a Democrat against an incumbent congressman from her own Republican Party.

She was, as they said, a one-issue candidate. But the issue was herself.

Everyone in Nassau County knew her story: How her quiet life evaporated on Dec. 7, 1993, when Colin Ferguson opened fire with a semiautomatic pistol on an evening rush hour commuter train, killing six people, including her husband, Dennis, and injuring 19, including her son Kevin.

After Ferguson was convicted, the victims and relatives were given a chance to speak.

In a scene depicted in the 1998 TV movie The Long Island Incident, Carolyn McCarthy stood behind her seated son, gripping his shoulder. She spoke to the killer without notes.

"You took away my husband. You took away my best friend. You cannot take away my memories of him. Everything that I had wanted to say about my husband, I don't want you to hear it. You don't deserve to hear what a good man he was.''

She couldn't see Kevin's tears; she could feel his body heaving. Half the courtroom was crying, including the stenographer and the defense lawyers. The judge had been gripping his pencil harder and harder. Finally, it snapped.

The next day he sentenced Ferguson to 200 years.

This shy, reserved woman became a leader of the victims' families and an advocate for gun control. That led to politics, even though until the shooting she had never met a reporter or run for so much as school board.

When McCarthy's U.S. representative, Dan Frisa, voted against a bill to ban assault weapons, she was so angry she told a Newsday reporter she might run, "If I get my Irish up."

The next morning, her comment was in the newspaper. She was told Dick Gephardt wanted to meet her. "Who's Dick Gephardt?" she asked of the House Democratic leader.

Nassau County Republican leaders told McCarthy to forget about challenging Frisa. After losing eight pounds fretting, she decided to run as a Democrat.

"Sometimes you are pushed into doing things you don't want to do," she said on the eve of her announcement. The next day she stood outside her house and announced ... sort of. Because of nerves or because a gust scattered the pages of her speech across the yard, she dropped the lines in which she was to have actually declared her candidacy.

She was not a conventional candidate. She hated to ask for money and would sometimes attend a fundraiser and forget to do so.

Because dyslexia made it difficult for her to read a speech, she would memorize talking points, extemporize and pray for the best. When she spoke to the Democratic Convention in Chicago, her legs literally shook. She told Newsday, "I was basically unconscious for the whole speech."

None of it mattered; so many voters admired her or pitied her or both. One morning, as she was campaigning near the Mineola train station, a young woman darted through traffic to cross the street and shake hands. "I'm so sorry about your husband," she gulped. "I really admire what you're doing," an older woman told her, "the way you're getting on with your life."

The prospect of a plain-spoken, down-home citizen legislator – Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington – was irresistible. McCarthy beat Frisa, who had more money and a better organization, 57% to 41%.

Years later, her main memory of that Election Night was sitting in a back stairway during the celebration, wondering, "Now what?"

WASHINGTON BATTLES

McCarthy arrived in Washington with a tail of news cameras, a clutch of gun law proposals and a problem: Many Democrats linked the party's advocacy of gun control to its loss of Congress in the 1994 elections and wanted nothing to do with the issue.

She never lost hope. After the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, she said "voters – mothers – are not going to tolerate this.'' She led an attempt to close a firearms law loophole that allowed some sales at gun shows without a background check.

Rep. John Dingell, a senior Democrat and National Rifle Association supporter, introduced a rival, weaker gun measure endorsed by the NRA. In the debate, McCarthy rose to speak well after midnight. It was her Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment – when good intentions and political reality collide.

All she was trying to do, she said, was "stop the criminals from being able to get guns. This is not a game to me. ... We have an opportunity in Washington to stop playing games. That is what I came to Washington for.''

She teared up. "I am sorry that this is very hard for me. I'm Irish, and I'm not supposed to cry in front of anyone. But I made a promise to my son and my husband. If there was anything I could do to prevent one family from going through what I have gone through … then I have done my job. Let me go home. Let me go home.''

She received a standing ovation from Democrats, including those who had opposed her. But her proposal went down.

McCarthy refocused. She tried to form alliances with Republicans. She learned to stay on message and watched her language – never "gun control,'' always "gun safety.''

She also moved beyond guns, using her nursing background to work on health care. In 2002, the president signed her bill to encourage hospitals to hire more nurses. She said nursing informed how she did this job: "Do what you can, save who you can, keep moving.''

Her moderate voting record suited a divided district. She won solid marks from both the liberal Americans for Democratic Action and the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She voted against a partial-birth abortion ban, and for a Republican resolution backing the war in Iraq.

She never lost her unsullied image, even after she told The New York Times that after six years in Washington, "I am a politician now.''

"She was a lay person who sent a powerful message,'' says Rosanna Perotti, a political scientist at Hofstra University on Long Island. "'This is not a closed game.'''

In 2007, after 32 people were killed in a shooting at Virginia Tech, tragedy finally translated into legislation. McCarthy's bill to improve the national gun background checks system became the decade's major gun law – albeit only with the NRA's support and President George W. Bush's signature.

Many gun control opponents have regarded McCarthy as simplistic and uninformed, if sincere. In 2007, in a live TV interview, she was forced to admit that she didn't know what a "barrel shroud'' was, even though it was included in her proposal for an assault weapons ban. (It's a covering for a hot gun barrel.)

"She's part of an anti-gun cabal,'' says Thomas King, president of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association. "We're sorry her husband was killed, but if there was someone on that train who had a firearm, he could have stopped it.''

HOME AT LAST

All politicians make promises they don't keep. Carolyn McCarthy's was to stop smoking a pack of Salems a day. In June 2013, she announced she was being treated for lung cancer.

She retreated to her house and garden in Mineola, spending the summer reading novels and watching C-SPAN. In January, she announced she would not run for re-election.

Besides a desire to slow down at 70, her decision seems a complicated mixture of wishful thinking and weary resignation, of optimism that the gun control movement will move ahead without her, and pessimism that Congress' Gun Lady has done all she could.

The optimism seems forced, especially regarding the political impact of Newtown.

Although the Obama administration introduced a package of gun measures after the incident, it did not come close to passage.

Although McCarthy cites the emergence of Newtown parents as gun safety advocates, none is as recognizable as she.

Although she praises the formation of a House task force on gun violence, no Republican has agreed to join. One member, Arizona Democrat Ron Barber – Giffords' successor – was defeated for re-election last month.

While many analysts regarded Newtown as proof that gun control was beyond hope, McCarthy says she "saw us going forward. … I know that maybe there's not something visible there, but I saw things going on, in the states, different than several years ago. Maybe I was paying attention more than most people.''

But Newtown also exemplified what had worn her down. "Every time there's a shooting, my relatives call – 'Are you all right?''' she says. "They saw how I took every shooting personally. .. Every killing wore a little bit of me away.'' She pauses. "It's just time.''

She's had to watch gun control stagnate as other controversial issues – health insurance, immigration, gay marriage, climate change – advanced. Most analysts say that's not McCarthy's fault, given the headwinds she faced, from the rise of the gun lobby to the decline of bipartisan cooperation.

She says she promoted awareness, kept the issue alive. If so, her personal legacy rests largely on the future – if it has one – of gun control.

Josh Horwitz, director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, met McCarthy when she came to Washington to lobby Congress in 1994. He has a photo of her over his desk. He says it reminds him of her "quiet power.''

"When her party leaders said, 'Don't talk guns,' she said, 'That's what I'm here for!' '' he recalls. "She was a voice in a very, very bleak time.''