The words first came out during a rally in support of police following the murders of cops in Dallas and Baton Rouge.  Granted, whipping up the groundlings is a time for simplistic slogans, not thoughtful nuance.

“Target our citizens, target our police, and you’re going home in a body bag,” Mangano said, to thunderous applause at Eisenhower Park, where hundreds of firefighters representing every Nassau fire department and some from Suffolk County rallied in support of police.

Ed Mangano is the Nassau County Executive, having won election as a sacrificial lamb candidate against the incumbent, Tom Suozzi, in 2009. It was one of those shocking upset, not the least to his own party, who would have run someone who wasn’t a blithering idiot had they realized they could win. But Suozzi took his re-election for granted, and boom, Mangano took the election.  And now, in his second term after beating Suozzi in earnest, he’s no longer considered a bad joke.

But his “body bags” comment wasn’t just hyperbole for a crowd inclined to applaud such lines. 

“The number one priority is to terminate, that is what the model is now,” Mangano said.

Mangano was taken to task for uttering the words of a “mad man” by Newsday columnist Joye Brown,

“Body bag” rhetoric also could help undermine weeks of efforts by local authorities and black and Hispanic communities working to ease tensions, and strengthen police-neighborhood relationships in the wake of the police-involved shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, and the retaliatory shootings of police officers in Texas.

In an interview Monday, Mangano stood behind his statement, saying that the “body bag” comment was just a portion of his off-the-cuff remarks in support of Nassau’s police officers. The intent wasn’t to incite or escalate tensions, but to note how the county’s police procedures for handling active shooters have changed, Mangano said.

Changed?  In a place where shoot first, shoot stupid, has long been the norm, it’s hard to see how a policy change will matter.  Yet, Mangano, smelling the love, not only stuck to his guns, but doubled down.

To answer columnist Joye Brown’s question in her column “Do ‘body bags’ comments go too far?” [News, July 25] is no. My comment at a fire department rally to support police is a statement of fact rather than a call to incite. If someone targets citizens, if they target police, they will go home in a body bag!

Might there be anything like, you know, law involved?  Hell, no.

Terrorists have made it clear that their mission is to kill unarmed citizens and police. Residents must know that the first priority for police in an active-shooter attack is to kill the shooter. This policy is a departure from past procedures.

In light of cops killing people when they shouldn’t, when the threat they feel isn’t real, some voices challenge the extant law relating to police use of force, particularly deadly force, as being unduly favorable to police needlessly killing people. As of this moment, the number stands at 675 for the year. Police line of duty deaths stand at 70, with 26 being auto. Cops killed by gunfire is at 33, up 83%. Two mass murders skewed the numbers.

If killing random cops isn’t merely horrifically wrong and counterproductive, is the knee-jerk alternative killing in response any more responsible?

Through our active-shooter seminars, we are alerting citizens that police will first terminate the shooter, then attend to the wounded. Citizens are instructed to run, hide or fight — in that order. Do not try to negotiate or beg for your life because active-shooter history indicates you will likely be shot.

This is not pleasant news to deliver, but it is reality and provides the best odds for surviving. Be prepared, not scared.

Not that the cops will terminate the threat, but terminate the shooter. Kill is the new policy. Kill, kill, kill.

It may well be that, in the course of an “active shooter” threat, it is necessary to kill, but even then, the point isn’t to kill but to end the threat.  If the active shooter is stopped, say by a bullet to his body, and no longer presents a threat, is Mangano saying that the first cop on the scene should then execute him, put a bullet into his head?  So it would seem.

Whether the Nassau County Police take this moron’s rhetoric seriously is unknown.  I suspect that they’re shaking their heads, appreciative of his mindless support, but similarly aware that his call for body bags is batshit crazy. Mangano may be the County Executive, but that doesn’t mean he has a clue, or any influence on how the police are trained or what their procedures will be.  Then again, it’s not as if killing people presented a big hurdle in the past for the Nassau police.

The more significant impact is that of reducing the rhetoric to its lowest possible level. When it comes to police addressing a threat, the goal is to end the threat. Killing is the last resort, not the first. It’s not about body bags. It’s about safety. One would hope the police realize this, even if their elected boss is too much of a vicious fool to grasp it.

But that the chief elected official spews such simplistic, wrong and illegal slogans that reduce the intelligence in their county to slightly below a gnat, feeds the anger of the mob and emboldens the ignorant to applaud killing as the new normal is inexcusable.

That Ed Mangano whipped up the crowd at a rally with his two word answers was bad enough. That he’s claiming to impose a new policy that violates even the ridiculously favorable rules for police use of deadly force is fundamentally irresponsible. Getting elected doesn’t give rise to making your constituents stupider.  And it surely doesn’t give rise to a new policy of needlessly murdering people because it gets you the applause of the crowd.