More than eighteen months after voters sent her to Washington to "do something about gun violence," Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy last week proposed a wide-ranging gun bill that critics, among them the National Rifle Association, charge is filled with tired and, often-times dizzyingly redundant, legislation.

"When I was [back] in the district [recently], everywhere I went, the children asked me. 'Should we be putting metal detectors up in our school?' The mothers asked me, 'What can we do? I'm afraid,'" McCarthy said during a Washington news conference attended by Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, gun control advocate Sarah Brady, and scores of school children.

Those concerns, the congresswoman said, were a natural response to the spate of recent schoolyard shootings in the deep south and far west.

Saying that she shares those concerns, the one-time nurse who was widowed by Colin Ferguson during a bloody massacre on a Long Island Rail Road train, announced that she was proposing sweeping legislation that would stress adults' responsibilities when it comes to exposing young people to guns.

She also allowed that should the bill be adopted, she would be more than ready to retire from congress.

Among the McCarthy bill's key provisions are the following:

* A $10,000 fine to be imposed on any adult whose child gets hold of a weapon and shows it in public. If the child uses the gun in a shooting, the penalty for the parent could include up to six months in jail.

* Gun dealers would have their licenses revoked for selling firearms to underaged buyers.

* Gun makers would have to produce "child proof" guns, as part of new safety standards calling for locks, triggers requiring more pressure, and drop tests to ensure that guns don't go off accidentally.

* The bill also calls for $150 million to be allocated over the next three years for gun education in schools, and $25 million to be allocated over the next five years to track gun injuries among children nationwide in hopes of crafting preventative strategies to stem gun violence.

* In addition, the Consumer Product Safety Commission would be authorized to study and test "child resistant mechanisms," such as "smart guns" that only the firearm's owner can fire.

With only six widely interspersed weeks left in this congressional session ¬ a session during which House Speaker Newt Gingrich deliberately sought to avoid controversial election year issues ¬ sources close to the House of Representatives put the odds against the bill's passage at somewhere between 70-30 and 60-40.

Two things the bill has going for it are the fact that a number of Republican house members ¬ including Marge Roukema, from New Jersey, and Chris Shays, from Connecticut ¬ are among its 38 co-sponsors, and that there is already a Senate version of the bill, sponsored by Edward Kennedy, of Massachusetts, with Democrats Chris Dodd, of Connecticut and Jack Reed, of Rhode Island, signing on as co-sponsors.

"The problem," a prominent Democrat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, "is that we're talking about a hot issue and what, in both cases is essentially a Democratic bill being proposed in Republican controlled bodies."

As already alluded to, however, the other thing working against the bill is time. Congresswoman McCarthy only announced her sponsorship of the bill on Wednesday, June 17, a scant eight days before the house recesses for a two-week summer vacation.

Though Congress reconvenes for the last three weeks of July, representatives take the entire month of August off, and then come back for only three weeks in September before hunkering down for the October campaign season.

Though the McCarthy bill has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee, headed by Republican chairman Henry Hyde of Illinois, as this week's recess approached, no action had been taken on it.

It is up to the judiciary committee to decide whether to simply table the bill, hold hearings on it, or pass it on to the floor of the house for a vote.

Even assuming the bill was put on a fast track ¬ which, again, given that this is an election year for Congress, is unlikely ¬ it would still have to go through the process by which all bills become law.

First, it would have to be voted on and passed by both the House and the Senate. Then, it would have to be forwarded to a conference committee to iron out the differences between the Senate and the house bills.

Typically, though bills considered in each House might have the same intent, the details might vary considerably. Then too, if as in this case a bill calls for congressional funding for a specific purpose the funding mechanisms ratified by each entity might be somewhat different.

The conference committee must hammer out these details and then send the final bill to both the House and Senate for ratification all over again.

"This is such a major bill, concerning such a controversial issue, that it would almost certainly require lengthy hearings before passage," said our source on Capitol Hill.

"One of the few ways that you could possibly get this done before the November elections would be to take it and attach it, as an amendment, to something that will be taken up by the house in the interim."

Predictably, the McCarthy bill has many critics, among them former Republican congressman Dan Frisa, who this year is making a comeback bid for the seat the congresswoman now holds.

"It's just much too little and far too late," Frisa said earlier this week. "The irony is, proposing this bill now, just for the benefits it might bring her in this fall's election, shows that she is the one-issue candidate she always claimed not to be."

Predictably, the National Rifle Association also takes issue with McCarthy's bill. Their criticism, however, is not that they are being made scapegoats for the recent string of school shootings, but that almost every facet of the new bill is already either a state or federal law.

Presently, according to Professor John Lott of the University of Chicago, there are approximately 40,000 laws on the books pertaining to firearms across the United States.

"In our view, the bill proposed by Congresswoman McCarthy is completely unnecessary," said Mary Jolly, the former school teacher who now serves as director and chief counsel of the federal affairs division of the NRA.

"Why? Because nearly everything juveniles do with firearms is against the law. The problem, it seems to us, is not that the appropriate laws do not exist, but that the enforcement of many of those laws has been lackluster at best.

"Take, for instance, the ban on firearms in the hands of juveniles that was passed in 1994. Afterwards the Department of Justice reported that the number of youth's prosecuted in the entire nation under that law was 18 ¬ that's 18.

"That's why I characterize the problem as not one of needing more laws, but of needing a real prosecution effort when laws are broken."

Jolly continued, "In terms of making parents act more responsibly... well... there are already laws on the books, on the state and federal level, pertaining to negligence, recklessness and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

"Our core belief is that if you promote good families, a good educational system, and teach safety, responsibility and freedom to our young people, you'll mitigate these incidents in ways that you never could by the passage of another, unenforced law."

"Our biggest problem is getting police to arrest, prosecutors to prosecute, and judges to sentence people who break these laws to jail time.

"In this country there is an awful lot of plea bargaining going on, and not a lot of justice for the common man and the victims. Sadly, it seems that victims are often-times victimized twice, by the perpetrator of a crime against them, and by the justice system."

Asked the NRA's specific objections to specific parts of the bill, Jolly said that essentially, each portion of the bill "barks up the wrong tree."

"On the face of it, a lot of people will say, 'Yes, if a child shoots and injures somebody, their parents must share the blame and penalty. But it seems to me that if you have a problem with a child, a problem that manifests itself when he or she gets hold of a firearm, then that's a problem that exists within the child and within the family.

"If you put the parents in jail, who takes care of the kid? Who gets the kid the help he or she needs? Rather than solving a problem, a provision like that could very well wind up taking a situation and blowing it up even further.

"Another provision of the bill makes it illegal for gun dealers to sell firearms to underage buyers. That law has been on the books since the passage of the 1968 Gun Control Act.

"Under that law, it is illegal to sell a shotgun or a rifle to anyone under the age of 18, and it is illegal to sell a handgun to anyone under the age of 21.

"To do so is a felony, punishable by a $5,000 fine and up to five year in prison," Jolly continued.

"As I see it, almost every section of her bill talks about doing something that has been done for years. Even the spending that she's proposing, $150 million a year for gun education and so forth, is already being done.

"The NRA alone has spent over $100 million over the last 10 years on education programs for young people, programs that have been employed in grade schools across the country, and in conjunction with the FBI and numerous sheriff's departments.

"In addition, in 1974, Congress passed the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Act, which established a number of grant programs for all manner of prevention programs. These grants are usually secured by scouting groups, the American Legion, 4H and entities like that, and anyone wishing to find out more about them can do so simply by contacting their local juvenile court or social work system."

Jolly also argued that McCarthy's provision regarding trigger locks will be ineffective because, ironically, trigger locks often don't prevent the discharge of a firearm.

"The only way to truly insure that a firearm won't fire is to take the ammunition out of it," she said.

"You might give some people a kind of tentative peace of mind by passing mandates for trigger locks into law, but you're not really protecting them. It's kind of a phoney solution. Again, the only way to really prevent a gun from firing is to take the ammunition out of it.

"The NRA supports new technology, but sees no reason to mandate trigger locks. The answer, to us, is education. Not gadgets, but good training.

"Up on Capitol Hill, a lot of times, they opt for Band-Aid effects. They introduce bills that make good press copy, but don't really solve anything.

"What should be most troubling to taxpayers is that McCarthy's bill contains no bottom line price tag. It's open ended. And in our view the cost of the bill if adopted would be phenomenal to do things that have already been done.

"My bottom line on most of this is, we are living in a time when parents have and are attempting to shove their responsibility for raising their children to someone else, whether that be the schools, the court system, the government, or whomever. Sadly, people just don't seem to know how to raise their own kids anymore," Jolly said.