Gun violence turned Carolyn McCarthy into a widow after her husband was killed during a 1993 shooting rampage on a commuter rail train. But according to the National Rifle Association, the New York Democratic rep has “no idea what [she’s] talking about” when it comes to understanding firearms and gun violence.
A ThinkProgress video shows an NRA panel targeting McCarthy, an outspoken leader in the fight for stricter gun control laws, at the Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend. During the presentation, NRA organizer Colton Kerrigan played a news clip of the New York congresswoman and mocked her for not being able to identify individual parts of a gun, specifically the barrel shroud.
“These lawmakers who are making these laws have no idea what they’re talking about,” Kerrigan told the crowd. “The underlying theme of all of this is, at the end of the day, the lawmakers have no idea what they’re writing, never shot a gun before, and yet they’re going to come and tell you what you should and should not own to make everybody else safer, yet they couldn’t tell you the difference between the butt or the barrel of a gun.”
McCarthy has been part of a coalition of lawmakers pushing for new legislation banning assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips.
Sarah Muller