Hurt said that she works for an organization that, "If they pass the virus, then they are tried for murder or attempted murder."
Hurt thinks the same standard should apply to the general public.
"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 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," the council member added.
Hurt's suggestion comes as the Nashville-Davidson County COVID-19 dashboard indicates a recent decline in new daily cases of COVID-19 and a fatality rate of 0.9 percent.
With regard to mask enforcement, Hurt was critical of the actions to date.
"It seems to me that we have been more reactive as opposed to proactive and a little too late, too little," Hurt said.
Hurt had to be reminded by Metro Nashville's Director of Legislative Affairs Mike Jameson, who also participated in the virtual meeting, whose jurisdiction it is to create a new code or class of criminal offenses.
"The Council does not have the opportunity on its own to create criminal legislation," he said. "In terms of creating a new code or class of criminal offenses, that is a creature of state law."
Hurt expressed her disappointment, "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."
Hurt's proposal came the same day that Mayor John Cooper issued a statement that the Metro Nashville Police Department was ordered to issue citations to persons not complying with the Health Department's mask order.
The new initiative involves increasing police presence on Friday and Saturday nights with 24 officers conducting walking patrols on Broadway from 3:30 p.m. to midnight. An additional six officers will be on ATVs to stop and cite any "transpotainment" vehicles operating in violation of the Health Department's prohibition.
The additional 30 officers is an increase over the 19 school resource officers who have been on Broadway working on public mask compliance on prior Friday and Saturday nights since mid-July, the statement said.
Mayor Cooper once again enhanced his clampdown on Nashville's main tourism attraction by prohibiting alcoholic beverage sale, possession or consumption except for on-premises or delivery through his Public Health Order 10 that went into effect Saturday.
The video of the Joint Public Safety and Health Committee can be watched here with Metro Council Member-At-Large Sharon Hurt beginning at the 1:01:40 mark.
Reader Comments
“Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany-not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted-or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.” p ix They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer, immigrant German Jew
“Ideology is inseparable from totalitarianism, which is the antithesis of all the Liberal holds dear, embodying the very opposite of liberty, tolerance and rationality, of enlightenment and progress. An ideology is a ‘closed’ system of ideas which inevitably leads to a ‘closed society’ in which freedom has no place.”--The Logic of Political Belief, Ian Adams
“Of this latter class – that is, the self-conceited, wise, virtuous, and religious class – are those woman suffrage persons who are so anxious that women should participate in all the falsehood, absurdity, usurpation, and crime of making laws, and enforcing them upon other persons. It is astonishing what an amount of wisdom, virtue, and knowledge they propose to inflict upon, or force into, the rest of mankind, if they can but be permitted to participate with the men in making laws. According to their own promises and predictions, there will not be a single natural human being left upon the globe, if the women can but get hold of us, and add their power to that of the men in making such laws as nobody has any right to make, and such as nobody will be under the least obligation to obey.” p3 --Against Woman Suffrage, Lysander Spooner
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Anti-centralist social revolutionary
“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures, who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.
To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished...then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, villified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed,…”
“Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own. The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means.”--The Mainspring of Human Progress, Henry Grady Weaver