Nashville Metro councilwoman Sharon Hurt wants any person not wearing a mask to be “tried for murder or attempted murder.”
“My question goes back to legislation,” Hurt said during a meeting between Public Safety, Beer & Regulated Beverages and Health, Hospitals, & Social Services committees last week.
“But my concern is — you know I work for an organization, that if they pass a virus, then they are tried for murder or attempted murder, if they are not told … and this person who may very well pass this virus that’s out in the air because they’re not wearing a mask is basically doing the same thing to someone who contracts it and dies from it," she continued.
“It seems to me that we have been more reactive, as opposed to proactive, and a little too late, too little,” Hurt said. “Maybe there needs to be stronger legislation to say that if you do not wear a mask and you subject exposure of this virus to someone else then there will be some stronger penalty as it is in other viruses that are exposed.”
Nashville city councilwoman Sharon Hurt calls for legislation to charge people with murder for not wearing a mask
(also claims coronavirus is airborne)
She’s disappointed when she learns she can’t do this pic.twitter.com/7bRokB4crn
— Roz ☀️
(@PolitiKurd) August 8, 2020
Metro Nashville's Director of Legislative Affairs Mike Jameson had to let her know that the city committees can't do something like that.
“The Council does not have the opportunity on its own to create criminal legislation,” he told her. “In terms of creating a new code or class of criminal offenses, that is a creature of state law.”
Hurt responded, “I was afraid that was going to be the answer.”
“I guess that’s the whole point of asking for something to be done as early as the Council was pushing,” she added. “It seems it was not taken as seriously as it should have been and thus we are in the situation we are in right now.”
Here is the video of the meeting...Sharon Hurt begins at the 1:01:40 mark: