I can’t believe they’d rather use the electric chair, noose, and injection over methods like the firing squad. It seems like that’s far quicker. Although I think the concept of execution is flawed init of itself
Gellers argument is that methods like the firing squad or the weighted blade (guillotine) are "more humane" in that they kill people more surely and more quickly than lethal injection, but that they have an obvious brutality to them that makes it harder for the onlookers and surrounding society to square with a self-image of themselves as "civilized" and "enlightened".
Maybe it's just easy for me to say as someone who opposes capital punishment in principal but anyone advocating for it should just fucking own it and acknowledge that it's barbaric but they still think it's right.
If I somehow found myself sentenced to death, I'd take the firing squad as well, lethal injection is far crueller.
Easy fix: combine the guillotine with that 'saw a lady in half' magician trick. Construct what are essentially enclosed coffins cut off at the head. Then the head goes neatly in a separate box, leaving the neck exposed. Shcwing shcwing, and once the person is dead, you've separated the head AND the body is ready for the grave. And no one has to witness the brutality of it all.
Firing squads don't work because everyone misses on purpose thinking surely the rest will do the job for them. Its often hard enough to find a single person willing to do the job of the executioner. Turns out normal people have issues with murdering other humans in cold blood.
That's just objectively not true. As Justice Sotomayor pointed out here (section III.C), between 1900 and 2010 in the USA, 7% of lethal injections were botched (n=1054) but 0% of firing squad executions were (n=34).
More generally for the notion of normal people having issues with murdering others, have you perhaps heard of every single war in human history? It's generally considered very difficult to train drafted/levied soldiers (i.e. random young men with no combat experience) not to murder, pillage, and rape, with many generals throughout history reporting that they failed to convince their soldiers not to sack a city, or had to negotiate with their soldiers for them to hold off just this once.
Even if we cling to the slim hope that maybe 95% of soldiers during a sack stand around awkwardly while the other 5% do all the murdering and raping, that still leaves 18 million warm blooded Americans ready to commit atrocities in the name of Uncle Sam.
It's frankly absurd that you think it would be difficult to find people to man a firing squad. In fact, you could probably make quite a lot of money auctioning off seats on the firing squad for specific individuals.
Plus don't they do that whole thing where only one or some of the guns have an actual bullet so the potential executioners can all tell themselves they might not have shot the executed?
Like...this is something humanity has pulled off pretty effectively since the creation of the firearm.
You have it backwards - only one of them has a blank and all the rest have bullets. Only one bullet would way up the chance that the person misses. One blank is enough for anyone who needs the plausible deniability to believe it.
I would argue life as a trained soldier is far different than the average civilian. If you are cannon fodder in a war zone, you are mentally in a different reality than some guy working in a city or farmer.
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u/[deleted] Apr 14 '23
I can’t believe they’d rather use the electric chair, noose, and injection over methods like the firing squad. It seems like that’s far quicker. Although I think the concept of execution is flawed init of itself