Nancy Sinatra has not been in the news recently, probably not since her 1966 hit single “These Boots are Made for Walking.” Now the daughter of the famous crooner and actor Frank Sinatra, at the age of 77, is back in the headlines in the worst possible way, calling for the execution of NRA members (it is unclear whether she means all five million of them) by firing squad.
Ms. Sinatra started the fun when she tweeted, “The murderous Members of the NRA should face a firing squad.” The tweet was an apparent reaction to the Las Vegas massacre in which an apparently disturbed man named Stephan Paddock opened fire at a country music festival and killed 59 people, wounding over 500.
The reaction was a fusillade of tweets
Twitter being what it is, the response came fast and furious. Many respondents wondered if she was really calling for the mass killing of five million people who are members of the National Rifle Association. Having been informed of how many people are NRA members, Sinatra seemed to backtrack and said, in effect, no, just the “murderous members.”
Sinatra did not define what she meant by “murderous members” of the NRA. If she meant NRA members who had actually committed murder, she seemed to be unaware that the criminal justice system has procedures for dealing with such people. The ignorance of how murder is prosecuted in the United States was strange coming from someone whose father was said to be mob connected.
Who was Sinatra talking about?
If she meant people who supported policies that, in her view, encouraged murder, she is off base as well. It is the view of the NRA, which when all is said and done is a civil rights organization, that private ownership of firearms deters crime.
Sinatra seems to be unclear about the logistics of killing five million people.
The Nazis found that killing innocent people by gunfire was inefficient and tended to be a morale buster even for the most hardened SS soldiers. The Nazis solved the problem (as they saw it) of genocide by developing the gas chamber. One doubts that Sinatra has considered that relation.
The aging singer was also unclear about what role due process would have in her scheme to rid the world of the NRA?
Would members (murderous or otherwise) be put on trial with possible defenses (“I was duped! I didn’t know!”). Maybe her idea is that law enforcement would seize the membership rolls of the NRA, come for the members (murderous or otherwise) in the middle of the night, line them up against the wall, and fill them full of led. Considering that Ms. Sinatra thinks NRA members are “murderous” and that they tend to be well armed, one wonders how that would work.
