Carolyn McCarthy, a former nine-term congresswoman from Long Island who became a champion of gun regulation after her family was shattered by a deranged shooter on a commuter train — transforming herself from a nurse and homemaker into a national symbol of unflinching, if largely frustrated, advocacy — died on Thursday at her home in Fort Myers, Fla. She was 81.
Cecelia J. Prewett, a former communications director for Ms. McCarthy in Washington, confirmed the death but did not give the cause. Ms. McCarthy was found to have lung cancer in 2013.
On the night of Dec. 7, 1993, a Christmas tree lying in her driveway was Ms. McCarthy’s first sign that something had gone wrong. She returned late to her house in Mineola, 20 miles east of Manhattan on Long Island, after attending a Christmas concert with a friend. There, to her puzzlement and slight annoyance, lay the tree. Her husband, Dennis, and their son, Kevin, were supposed to have taken it inside and put it up.
Then she saw one of her brothers. In that era before smartphones, he was the one who broke the news that was hours old but unknown to her: Dennis, 52, her husband of nearly 27 years, was dead. Kevin, 26, had been shot in the head and left to fight for his life.
Father and son both worked for Prudential Securities, a financial services firm in Manhattan. They were heading home together that evening on the 5:33 Long Island Rail Road train out of Pennsylvania Station. As the train approached the Merillon Avenue station, one stop from Mineola, a Jamaican immigrant on board, Colin Ferguson, reached into a bag, pulled out a 9-millimeter semiautomatic gun with a 15-round magazine and began firing. After emptying one ammo clip, he inserted another, and emptied it, too. Finally, as he tried to reload once more, three passengers overpowered him.
The devastation was thorough. Five people in addition to Dennis McCarthy were dead. Eighteen were wounded besides Kevin McCarthy, whom hospital doctors gave slim odds of survival.
On learning what happened, Ms. McCarthy slumped to her front steps. “I just started screaming a little bit,” she recalled in an interview for this obituary in 2014.
“And then,” she continued, “I said, ‘OK, let’s get to the hospital.’”
The resolve that she so quickly displayed would become familiar to — and widely admired by — people across Long Island and much of the country. The woman who rose from those front steps was soon to turn herself into a determined advocate for measures to rein in the country’s horrific gun violence.
But tending to her stricken son came first. Ms. McCarthy refused to accept that he would not live. She had been a licensed practical nurse for 30 years, working in emergency rooms and on many hopeless cases. “I took care of patients when nobody else would take care of them,” she said.
She was right about Kevin. Against all odds, he pulled through and returned to work, albeit paralyzed on his left side, unable to perform simple tasks like lacing his shoes. Velcro tabs kept them bound.
In short order, Ms. McCarthy threw herself into gun-control advocacy, though not at first with any thought of running for elective office. “All of a sudden, I had a voice,” she recalled in 2014.
Largely on the strength of the gun issue, she campaigned in 1994 for Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, a Democrat running for re-election, unsuccessfully as it turned out. (She never got Mr. Cuomo’s name quite right. In her broad-voweled Long Island locution, it came out CO-mo.) She supported him despite being a registered Republican, like most of her neighbors, people typically from white working-class families that had left New York City for the suburbs soon after World War II. But partisan politics mattered little to her in those days. Nursing and tending to her family — and skiing — were her main interests.
New allies in the struggle for gun laws described her as tireless.
“She would, on the shortest of notice, devote herself to do a press conference, do an interview,” said Richard M. Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City. In the mid-1990s, he was president of Handgun Control Inc., now called the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. He added: “She never said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Where?’ and ‘When?’”
Ms. McCarthy also emerged as a spokeswoman for Mr. Ferguson’s victims at his trial, in which his lawyers initially tried to argue that he had been driven temporarily insane by “Black rage,” a condition induced, they said, by racial injustice. Mr. Ferguson insisted on running his own defense, which involved ranting about supposed conspiracies against him and hectoring his victims when they testified. In February 1995, he was convicted of multiple counts of murder and attempted murder and sentenced to 315 years in a state prison.
With that, Ms. McCarthy was done with him. “You will be gone from my thoughts forever,” she said to her husband’s killer at a pre-sentencing hearing. “And we will learn to laugh again. But you will not.”
The Long Island Rail Road massacre — Ms. McCarthy never called it that; it was always “the incident” — helped lead to a 1994 federal law banning 19 kinds of semiautomatic weapons and the type of high-capacity magazine that gave Mr. Ferguson more time to keep shooting without having to reload.
That law was allowed to expire in 2004. But congressional Republicans tried to overturn it well before then. One of them was Representative Daniel Frisa, from New York’s Fourth Congressional District, in Nassau County — Ms. McCarthy’s district. Mr. Frisa’s vote in 1996 to repeal the so-called assault-weapons ban infuriated her. Someone had to take him on, she said.
And so she did.
Suddenly, a National Figure
When she first ran for Congress, Ms. McCarthy turned reflexively to Long Island’s Republican leaders, but they had no stomach for a divisive primary. Democrats were interested, though, among them Richard A. Gephardt, the House minority leader. Ms. McCarthy was so unfamiliar with Washington back then that she later recounted how “a guy named Dick Gephardt called me — didn’t know who he was.”
On a May morning in 1996, she formally announced that she would run against Mr. Frisa on the Democratic line (though she remained a registered Republican until 2003). With Kevin at her side, she faced news gatherers in front of her Mineola house. This was where she had lived since 1952, when her parents, Thomas and Irene Cook, moved from Brooklyn with their five children, including 8-year-old Carolyn. It was where she and Dennis were married, where she held a funeral reception for him, and where she remained until 2015, when she moved to Florida.
She had a prepared speech that morning, but tossed it aside after a fumbling attempt to read it. This was not theatrics. She had dyslexia, a condition that she did not discuss publicly at the time but would do so often in later years.
In the 1996 campaign, Ms. McCarthy became a popular presence: a political rookie at age 52, with hair tied in the back, bangs covering her forehead, a manner anything but slick and an accessibility as apparent as the flaming red jacket that became her signature garment. Mr. Frisa waved her off as a Janie One Note, focused solely on guns. She didn’t care.
“Everyone that ever ran against me always said, ‘She’s only a one-issue candidate,’” she said in 2014. “I said, ‘Yeah, but at least I’ve got an issue.’ And by the way, I’m a woman. There’s no such thing as a woman having one issue.”
That November, she won convincingly, 57 percent to 41 percent. Triumph turned her into a national figure. This was the stuff of Hollywood screenplays — “Ms. McCarthy Goes to Washington,” if you will. Indeed, NBC made a 1998 movie about her odyssey from nurse to congresswoman, “The Long Island Incident.”
Ms. McCarthy would be re-elected eight times, on occasion by slender margins but for the most part handily enough.
Winning elections, though, proved to be the easy part. Much harder was passing the laws she wanted. She learned that lesson right away.
For instance, she sought to have child-safety locks required for all handguns. “It is a simple safety lock,” she pleaded to the full House in 1997. “We have bills that make it impossible for children to get into an aspirin bottle. Do my colleagues not think we should do the same thing with a gun?”
But leaders of both parties, notably in the Republican majority, refused to attach her proposal to a juvenile-justice bill. Ms. McCarthy did not disguise her frustration.
“You couldn’t talk to me for two days,” she said in June 1997. She had learned firsthand the power of the National Rifle Association. “There are a lot of members who are just afraid to take that vote,” she said.
‘I Never Gave Up’
Time and again, the outcome would be the same. Whether the issue was restoring an assault-weapons ban after the 1994 law expired, or limiting the capacity of ammunition magazines, or requiring parents to store guns safely at home, or opposing legislation that shielded firearms manufacturers and dealers from liability lawsuits, Ms. McCarthy landed on the losing side. During all but 4 of her 18 years in the House, Republicans were in control, averse to gun regulation in almost any form. Some Democrats were no different.
She allowed that the repeated defeats could get her down. She also received death threats, some deemed serious enough for her to have police protection at public appearances. But, she said in 2014, “I never gave up.”
Peter T. King, a former Republican congressman from Long Island, said that as the years passed, Ms. McCarthy came to accept Washington’s realities. “She didn’t accept the result,” he said, “but she accepted the fact that it was going to be a long, hard fight.”
She did have one notable success: legislation to improve the system of background checks on potentially ineligible gun buyers, like felons and the mentally ill. In January 2008, President George W. Bush signed this McCarthy-sponsored bill into law.
Other issues also mattered to her, like improving health care for the young and the elderly, fortifying environmental protections for Long Island Sound, and providing federal funds for the early detection of dyslexia.
As a Republican-turned-Democrat, Ms. McCarthy was not always easily labeled. A Roman Catholic, she opposed the death penalty, but she also supported abortion rights. She voted in 2003 for the war in Iraq and in 1998 for the House investigation that led to President Bill Clinton’s impeachment (though she voted against impeachment itself). In 2009, when Gov. David A. Paterson of New York appointed Kirsten Gillibrand, then an N.R.A. favorite, to fill a vacant Senate seat, Ms. McCarthy strongly objected. She even threatened to run against Ms. Gillibrand in a Democratic primary, then backed off.
But she did not delude herself about what accounted for her prominence. “I will never walk away from being called the gun lady,” Ms. McCarthy said in 2014, the year she announced she would not seek a 10th term. By then, having turned 70 and recovering from cancer, she decided that someone younger should be the go-to person for news reporters and others looking for comment as the nation’s gun horrors continued unabated, a grim litany of place names: Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook.
Sometimes, the carnage overwhelmed her.
“I think the one that hit me the most personally was Gabby Giffords, when she was shot,” she said in the 2014 interview, referring to Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who was shot in the head in 2011 during a public appearance in Tucson but survived.
“She was shot just like Kevin,” Ms. McCarthy said, adding, “I probably never stopped crying for three days, because it brought back so many memories of what Kevin went through, what we went through, what the other victims went through.
“And I said, ‘Surely, one of our own, they’re going to do something.’ No. Nothing.”
Working-Class Roots
She was born Carolyn Cook on Jan. 5, 1944, in Brooklyn. Her father was a boilermaker, as were her two brothers, Thomas and Peter. Her mother worked at the local Woolworth’s after the family’s move to Mineola in 1952.
Carolyn graduated from Mineola High School in 1962. She was not strong academically — a function of her dyslexia, she later learned. Instead of college, she enrolled in the nearby Glen Cove Nursing School. She was drawn to that profession after watching the tender care that a nurse gave to a boyfriend of hers who had been severely injured in a car accident, and who later died.
On a beach one day in 1964, the year she graduated from nursing school, she met a tall, blond fellow named Dennis McCarthy. They were married the same year Kevin was born, 1967.
She is survived by her son; a sister, Janice Petrozzo; her brothers; and two grandchildren. Another sister, Donna Sauer, died.
Ms. McCarthy “was a legitimate citizen-politician who wanted to make a difference,” said Lawrence C. Levy, a former columnist and editorial writer at Newsday and now executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. Her efforts were recognized in January, when she was one of 20 people whom President Joseph R. Biden awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal, one of the nation’s highest civilian honors.
Ms. McCarthy announced she had lung cancer in June 2013 and took a long leave for treatment. That November, she sued 70 companies that she said had exposed her to asbestos when she was a girl and thus contributed to her cancer. Some news commentators felt that the lawsuit was a misstep, given that she had been a pack-a-day smoker for much of her life.
Then again, controversy was a familiar companion for Ms. McCarthy from the moment she made the battle against gun violence her life’s work.
“Win or lose,” she said as her congressional days dwindled down, “at least I tried.”
Hannah Fidelman contributed reporting.
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