Posted on 10/11/2002 3:48:32 PM PDT by RogueIsland
WASHINGTON -- There is everything to like about Carolyn McCarthy.
The New York congresswoman who got to Washington on the trajectory of tragedy still laughs with gusto and dresses without flash and pulls back her hair in a ponytail like a suburban homemaker. That is what she was when a gunman on a Long Island Rail Road train shattered her old life and launched her toward another.
She took to politics after her husband was killed and her son gravely wounded aboard that commuter train. It was a way, maybe, to do something about guns in America. A way, perhaps, to keep the comfort of someone else’s daily routine from becoming a catastrophe.
McCarthy has been in Congress six years now. But you could, at any moment, imagine her not standing at a microphone but loading groceries into her car, or vacuuming it out, or mowing the lawn.
She is still just like her constituents. And they are just like the people of suburban Washington, terrorized by a sniper who has randomly killed six people and injured two while they were encased in the fragile comfort of daily routines.
So it is easy to like McCarthy. But it is hard to talk to her.
When we talk, it is usually because some new horror requires the conversation. And these conversations remind us only that we have done so little — nothing, really — about the glorification of guns and the way in which we make them so easily available to just about anyone who wants one.
“Did he buy his gun at a gun show?” McCarthy asked of the sniper, who experts say is using high-velocity, military-style bullets designed to cause maximum damage to a target. “Did he go through one of the loopholes that we have been trying to close?”
Maybe, maybe not. Civilian sales of military-style sniper rifles and ammunition are, apparently, all the rage. These may have replaced assault weapons as the latest must-have gadgets. In certain circles, anyway.
The trend was documented in a 1999 report by the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control group. It was, of course, ignored.
“A sniper subculture is burgeoning within the American civilian gun culture,” the report said. “This subculture glorifies the sniper fantasy, diminishes its human cost and teaches everything about sniping — from equipment and shooting skills to military and police sniping tactics.”
Its unofficial motto is “One shot, one kill.” This has, apparently, been taken seriously by Washington’s suburban sniper. He has murdered or wounded each of his victims with a single shot.
“The accuracy, range and power of a sniper rifle could present a grave danger if used by a determined criminal or a deranged gunman, and a serious threat to national security in the hands of a terrorist,” the report said.
McCarthy wonders if this sniper has a history of mental illness. That was the case with the gunman who disturbed another comforting routine — mass at Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church in Lynbrook, N.Y., last March — by killing the priest and a parishioner. The mentally ill are barred under a 1968 federal law from getting guns, but they still do. It is, in part, because states haven’t automated patient records or shared them with federal authorities, so they cannot be checked when a person buys a gun from a licensed dealer.
After the Lynbrook murders, McCarthy sponsored legislation to give states money to automate mental health records and turn them over. It passed easily out of the House Judiciary Committee; the selling point for the pro-gun lawmakers who control the panel was that her bill didn’t create some new law. But the House Republican leadership hasn’t allowed a floor vote.
McCarthy’s bill to keep mentally ill people from getting guns must wait its turn, she said, behind another piece of gun legislation now pending in the House: A measure to prohibit lawsuits against the gun industry.
McCarthy expected the leadership to bring the industry-protection measure up for a vote Thursday. Now it’s been put off. “We understand it was pulled,” she said.
The timing, you see, wasn’t quite right.
Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is:
One hardly needs to read past the first line, huh?
At the moment all the sacred sniper profiles have fallen by the wayside and the government is beginning to wake up to the fact that these snipers are part of a foreign military force.
No revision of any gunlaws could have stopped this.
No doubt Carolyn McCarthy voted yesterday to continue appeasing the terrorist dictatorship in Iraq.
Can we send her someplace where she can't hurt us anymore? Frankly, I don't trust her around the kids.
Summon the garlic and the holy water. Break out the crucifixes and the wooden stakes. Once again, something evil stalks the night.
I encountered so many gun owners who after 9/11 told me that "gun control was dead" in this country and who thought me either stupid or paranoid for telling them that gun control will never be "dead" to the anti-freedom forces in this country.
I am profoundly sad to see that I was entirely correct.
I LOVE this...gun grabbing liberals sat that it's SOOO easy to get a gun at a gun show. I defy them to try! If it was so easy, don't you think one of these news magazine shows, ie Dateline, 20/20 & the like, would have an investigative report? Something like..."guns are so easy to get at these gun shows that we took our undercover cameras & purchased these 5 guns yesterday".
But they don't....WHY? Because it can't be done. That's why. Hey, liberal media..PUT UP or SHUT UP. I'm sick of it.
Okay, I feel better now. :)
Well Gee Lady, duh!
Every notorious shot since JFK's has been by an extremely disturbed individual. Since the formulation of the drug "Haldol", the crazies have been wonder down our main streets in various states of reality. When we come to terms with mental illness in this country, crank-up the mental hospital once again, we will all be safer.
This isn't a problem for the NRA, it's a problem for the NAP (Nat. Assn. Psychiatry).
Interesting idea! Reminds me of Carlos Hathcock's stalk of the top Vietnamese sniper.
Hold on here....
Why in the hell do I need a NATIONAL PERMIT to exercise a right provided to me in the Bill of Rights (part of the Constitution)??
It was, of course, ignored.
Excerpt:
The civilian sniper culture is fed by the gun industry, nurtured by a fawning gun press, and disseminated through an array of commercial media enterprises. Industry advertising, favorable gun press articles, books, motion pictures, videos, video games, posters, and even tee shirts promote the sniper mystique.
The subculture even has its own cult figure, the late Carlos Hathcock, who as a Marine sniper in Vietnam was credited with the longest confirmed kill in history. It defies experience to believe that this blizzard of violent fantasy will not effect the greater society.
Tom Diaz
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Tom Diaz is part of the sub-culture of liars who are trying to take away my guns.
Instead, why not a national effort to train young people about the utility of firearms and the real meaning of the 2nd and the Constitution. Responsibility, not BS. These morons are the handmaidens of tyranny; their stupid, assinine approach is like trying to stop people from sitting on the needle in the haystack.
There is no f-ing way that any more gun control BS is going to stop the occasional, random nut or the fanatic muslim/terorist from carrying out acts of violence/terrorism. The only way to afford some protection from these things is with a well-armed populace. It won't always work, but if 20% of the citzenry carry, then that will spell out a powerful deterrent to the vermin and scumbags that now prey on us at whim. Some of them will think twice before sliding up to the ATM customer and demanding money. There sure as hell won't be any more Long Island railroad killings, nor any kind of crime on any mass transit conveyance. I don't know how these people like McCarthy can be so stupid. The only other answer is that they have some other agenda in mind, once the country is disarmed.
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