In honor of Women’s History Month, here’s my latest LIHerald.com column:
It’s been over 27 years since Colin Ferguson stepped onto a Long Island Rail Road train in Mineola and started indiscriminately firing a 9mm pistol at passengers. Six were killed, including Dennis McCarthy, of Mineola, and 19 were wounded. Dennis’s son, Kevin, then 26 and a broker with Prudential Securities in New York City, took a bullet to the head, but survived. His left arm remains partially paralyzed.
That attack propelled Carolyn McCarthy, Dennis’s wife and Kevin’s mother, to run for Congress. McCarthy, then a nurse, was assailed as a political neophyte and a single-issue candidate, with her laser focus on gun control. Despite the odds against her, she won, and served in the House of Representatives from 1997 to 2015, retiring because of a cancer diagnosis.
Throughout her time in Congress, McCarthy ably represented her district, becoming a respected member of the House and a strong-willed politician. She was frustrated often by the lack of movement on common-sense gun-control legislation, such as an assault weapons ban, because of big-money special-interest groups like the National Rifle Association.
Still, she endured.
It boggles the mind, but in the 243-year history of this nation, only two women have represented Long Island in the House of Representatives. McCarthy, who was elected in the 4th Congressional District, on Nassau’s South Shore, was the first, according to the Congressional Archives.
The second is her successor, Kathleen Rice, who was previously the Nassau County district attorney, and whom McCarthy strongly endorsed in the 2014 election against Republican Bruce Blakeman, the County Legislature’s former presiding officer and a current Town of Hempstead councilman.
To read the column in its entirety, click here.
