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:
Fifty years ago, the people were BUILDING the 10-Commandments monuments in civic plazas which are now being removed as fast as possible by the ACLU.
THere's ONE reason...
Wrong.
She cares about RE-ELECTION. Nothing else.
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That's the point. In the last 40 years America has developed a severe problem with lack of personal integrity, lack of morality, and lack of basic mental health in the general population. When thry kill each other, the easy way out is to blame guns. Fifty years ago all types of crime, gun and not gun related were tiney compared to the last 35 years. Sanity was in control of the culture.
In a nation of 270 million persons, about 1/4 are adult males. Call it 67 million. If one-tenth of one percent go insane in any given year that is 67500 new insane males per year. If one percent of those decide to murder, that is about 680 insane murderers a year. If ten percent of the insane murderers decide to use guns, that is 68 insane gun-using murderers per year. About 5-6 per month. So the leftist gun-grabbers will have 5 insane gun murderers per month to use in their ghoulish propaganda wars against the Second Amendment.
If an insane murderer uses, say, his car to drive into an elementary school and kill 5 kids (as happened here in CA), it is on page 38 of the paper and no celebrities are out there expressing shock and outrage--nor do we hear grandstanding politicians yelling about "tons of lethal metal" and the need to control private automobiles.
This isn't rocket science folks, it is elementary numbers.
--Boris
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