As a society, America is really schizophrenic about capital punishment. By and large we want it (based on a social myth that only the guilty are ever executed), but we want it to be clean and tidy and "humane" (not excruciatingly painful in appearance or, if possible, fact).
But killing people is, per se, messy. The body does not go quietly into that good night when being shoved there. The embarrassing number of botched lethal injections[1] over the past several years has led to any number of debates, discussions, and arguments over what forms of capital punishment may be best in this way, and a recent appeal to the Supreme Court (denied) by one death row prisoner asking for a firing squad rather than lethal injection highlighted one older option, though never one widely used (firing squads tend to be psychologically rough on the actual shooters, among other things).
Is it time to resurrect the guillotine? The device was originally invented as a more humane alternative to an axe, and as a purely mechanical device I'm pretty sure we can make it nearly foolproof in terms of its killing capability. Of course, it has the downside of being gruesomely messy — but maybe, as a society, we should be required to put up with that if we're going to be killing people by society's law.
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[1] Defined as lingering deaths where there was an appearance — or even speech — indicating that it was prolonged and painful.
Is The Firing Squad More Humane Than Lethal Injection?
Last week, the Supreme Court responded to a petition from a death row inmate in Alabama containing an unusual demand: He wanted to be executed by firing squad. The prisoner, a 75-year-old man named…
Killing things is a solved problem. How to feel good about it afterwards still needs a lot of work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_Coaster
+Mat Brown I'm not sure a string of 10G loops until hypoxia kicks in would be particularly pleasant.
There are methods of gentle, painless killing — more "traditional" euthanasia / assisted suicide folk use them. Unfortunately, those people seem less interested in administering drugs to people who are being given them by force, thus a major problem with the lethal injection procedures today.
The coaster is supposed to be quite euphoric and enjoyable although obviously nobody has built one to test it. Probably the best thing would be to just stop killing people in the first place.
There is an argument to be made that if the state (and one would hope, by extension, the people) feel it necessary to take a life, it should not be overly sanitized, lest we feel too accustomed to it (paraphrasing something else, though I find it appropriate).
Remember, the guillotine was a device not just intended to be humane, but also to have mechanical precision, assuage guilt, and to avoid the thorny issue of killing divine monarchs and their lines.
I'm wary of anything involving drugs or hypoxia. And it's unclear how long it takes for a victim of the guillotine to lose all sensation. For sheer speed and total disruption of the nervous system, there's no beating a massive high explosive. But a more reliable alternative might be an EXINT pod bomb. Go into a supersonic dive and drop the bomb…