McCarthy, Carolyn, 1944-

<p>Personal tragedy propelled Carolyn McCarthy into politics, after an act of gun violence took the life of her husband and seriously injured her son. McCarthy quickly became a well-known national advocate for gun control. In 1996 when she ran for a Long Island district seat in the House, McCarthy was initially dismissed as a political novice and a one-issue candidate. But she won and went on to serve nine terms in Congress. As the first woman to represent Long Island in the House, she helped pass legislation on a wide range of issues, including education reform, housing policy, and community health and safety.</p>

<p>Carolyn McCarthy was born Carolyn Cook in Brooklyn, New York, on January 5, 1944, daughter of Thomas Cook, a boilermaker, and Irene Cook, a homemaker and part-time saleswoman in a five-and-dime. She graduated from Mineola High School on Long Island in 1962 and earned a nursing degree from the Glen Cove Nursing School in 1964. She married Dennis McCarthy in 1967, and they raised one son, Kevin. For 30 years, Carolyn McCarthy worked as a licensed nurse in the intensive care unit of Glen Cove Hospital. On the evening of December 7, 1993, a gunman opened fire on a commuter train traveling from New York City to the Long Island suburbs. Dennis McCarthy was one of six people killed in the attack. McCarthy’s son, Kevin, was shot in the head but survived, one of 19 other injured commuters.</p>

<p>While McCarthy cared for her son, she also became a passionate advocate of gun control. She traveled to Washington to lobby Congress to support President William J. (Bill) Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which included a ban on assault weapons. When Representative Dan Frisa of New York opposed the assault weapons ban, McCarthy decided to challenge him for his seat in the House. As a registered Republican, McCarthy initially tried to run in the GOP primary but was discouraged from joining the race by the chairman of the powerful Nassau County Republican Party. The Democratic Party invited McCarthy to run on its ticket, and she accepted after a meeting with House Minority Leader Richard Andrew Gephardt of Missouri.</p>

<p>Carolyn McCarthy (born January 5, 1944) is an American nurse and politician who served as the U.S. Representative for New York's 4th congressional district from 1997 to 2015. She is a Democrat.</p>

<p>On January 8, 2014, she announced that she would not run for re-election that November, citing health; she retired in January 2015 and was replaced by fellow Democrat Kathleen Rice.</p>

<p>McCarthy, born Carolyn Cook in Brooklyn, was raised in Mineola, a suburban area on Long Island about twenty miles outside Manhattan. Her father was a boilermaker and her mother worked at Woolworth. In her youth, she was an athlete and wanted to become a physical education teacher but found reading challenging and later was diagnosed with dyslexia. After caring for a boyfriend who was injured in a car accident, McCarthy decided to work as a Licensed Practical Nurse. Later she married and she and her family lived in Mineola.</p>

<p>On December 7, 1993, her husband, Dennis, was killed, and her son, Kevin, was severely injured on a Long Island Rail Road commuter train at the Merillon Avenue station in the village of Garden City, when 35-year-old Colin Ferguson opened fire on passengers. Ferguson killed six and wounded 19 others. McCarthy responded to the crime by launching a campaign for more stringent gun control that eventually propelled her to Congress in 1996 on the Democratic ticket. She defeated freshman Republican Dan Frisa by a large margin. In the biographical 1998 television movie The Long Island Incident, which portrayed these events, she was played by actress Laurie Metcalf.</p>