Thank you, Carolyn

New York is losing a public servant and one of its most powerful voices against senseless firearm violence. We wish retiring Rep. Carolyn McCarthy the very best. McCarthy is the nurse and mother who lived through every American’s nightmare in 1993, when a madman on the Long Island Railroad shot her husband Dennis and her son Kevin.

Dennis died, one of six to be killed that day; Kevin, shot in the head, survived, one of 19 injured. Carolyn, her soul aching, found a way not only to live, but to serve.

Not many know how it happened. In the wake of the shooting, her Congressman, Republican Dan Frisa, was pressing for the repeal of the as- sault weapons ban Congress had passed in 1994. A Daily News reporter asked McCarthy if she would run against him.

“If I get mad enough, my Irish up enough, yeah, I’d do it,” the Mineola widow replied. And she did, the lifelong Republican running as a Democrat in 1996.

“With Capitol Hill dominated by lifetime politicians, it’s refreshing that the People’s House is attracting some real people,” this page wrote in support of her candidacy.

In November, she won her ninth term handily — crusading all along for sensible gun reform in the face of zealots who continue to insist that the Second Amendment is free license for anyone, anywhere, to wield any weapon.

Thank God she got her Irish up.