It's been nice letting the old fetid forum run on autoflame mode this weekend, but here's a story I can't resist posting. Quoted in full. Of course there will be. It's all happened before, it'll all happen again. We've seen the post mortem bloviations before, and we'll see them again, too. Just a little bit of bold in here for you, Neocon. It doesn't much matter, though.
Veteran of Gun Violence Offers Cold Candor on School Shootings nytimes.com
Of course there will be another schoolhouse rampage of gunfire, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy observed, cool as the trauma nurse she once was.
"Absolutely. Sure," she said in an interview, her voice firm, her gaze anguished. "That's one thing we did get out of all the committee hearings," she said of the serial congressional inquiries -- five so far -- that, she has found, follow so gravely yet inconsequentially upon the schoolhouse shootings that periodically seize the nation's attention.
"The psychologists, the crisis team researchers, they all come out to these hearings and say it's not a matter of if there's going to be another school shooting," said Mrs. McCarthy, looking darkly beyond the latest school gun carnage in Colorado. "It comes down to a question of when there'll be another shooting."
Mrs. McCarthy, D-N.Y., may speak with too much cold candor for the current capital mood. Reacting to the 15 gun deaths in Colorado, President Clinton has optimistically scheduled a "summit" of school experts on Monday. Republican congressional leaders talk of delving again into the problem, their words more resolute than their agenda.
Mrs. McCarthy feels entitled to her candor. As much as war-veteran lawmakers are consulted about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's attacks on Yugoslavia, the 55-year-old congresswoman represents a certain grisly expertise as the widow of a gunshot victim.
She became vaguely famous six years ago for her fury and her decision to go into politics because of a gunman's rampage that killed her husband, Dennis, and five others on a Long Island Rail Road train. She has since become a different person, in a way, a politician humbled by the way things work here, but one who personalizes the continuing gun deaths to keep her edge.
"I'm here two and a half years and that means I've lost -- what? -- close to 13,000 kids," the congresswoman said of the 5,000 American minors who are shot to death annually, most of them without stirring national attention. "You have to personalize it. That's what gives you the energy to keep fighting."
Mrs. McCarthy now knows the arcane turnings by which the gun control issue can get studied to a standstill here even as public concern is stoked with the killing of more innocents. She becomes jaded, but in the strange ways of Congress that she is coming to savor, she finds jadedness yields to fresh resolve.
"All right, the maneuvers," Mrs. McCarthy said, ticking off a list of legislative sidetrackings second nature to her. "The cop-out," she said of the renewed blame-saying over the state of mental health, national morality and entertainment violence. Important factors, she agrees, but hardly the heart of the matter.
"I'll give you a perfect example," she said, pointing to the Education Committee and its quick post-Colorado decision to propose "a comprehensive report" on school violence. "We got a lot of information in five earlier hearings, and in this one they've left one thing out: There's nothing in there to look at the easy access to guns. It's, like, 'We're going to do something. But we're not going to touch that.' "
In becoming a politician, Mrs. McCarthy has focused on other issues like education and breast cancer, working against any single-issue "gun nut" stereotyping, she says. Her bill for mandatory trigger locks and for penalizing parents who store their guns irresponsibly is not rooted in the usual "war of words" about the right to bear arms, she emphasizes. It has a narrower, more practical premise that adult gun owners should be held responsible for their possessions. She concedes that the bill is not very likely to move. She promises to rework it as amendments for other bills, and then to fight beyond that.
In response to a doubting glance at all her maneuvering, Mrs. McCarthy insists that the Colorado shootings seem of a different, more alarming, scale. "Women, mothers, kids are scared this time and still talk about it more than two weeks later," she said. "Usually these shootings have only a five- to seven-day spread," she added, speaking like a Capitol veteran.
"Kevin called almost immediately to see if I was all right," she said of the Colorado shootings and her son, who was critically wounded alongside his father in the commuter train. "Each new time hits us quite hard." Family endurance feeds her Capitol resolve. After each week's final vote, she hurries back to Mineola, where she lives with her brother, Tommy Cook, a veteran of the family's proud tradition as boilermakers, three generations deep.
Six months ago, Kevin and his wife, Leslie, introduced new life, a grandson for Mrs. McCarthy. He was named Denis after his late grandfather, with a single-"n" twist of Irish for good measure. As incumbent matriarch, Mrs. McCarthy scrapped her son's plans for this Mother's Day. "I said, 'Listen to me very carefully. You and Leslie are going out to eat. And I am staying home with the baby. That's what I want for Mother's Day.' "
The politician smiled. "I've been teaching Denis to roll over."
She seems stoic at how Mother's Day can be followed by a White House summit on the shooting of children. The congresswoman's message is as plain as the lesson of her new life as a politician. "Unless each and every American who cares about this issue becomes involved, it will die here," she declared coolly. "And the silence here in Congress is going to be deafening." |
