The Firing Squad Is Back - And Maybe That's a Good Thing

Great. Bring on the Firing Squad.

If the state is going to kill, it should at least have the courage to look its violence in the eye.

This is not a popular take. But stay with me.

The death penalty is abhorrent. A moral failure. No last-meal ritual can dress it up. But what disturbs me almost as much as the killing itself is the way it’s been made to look:

Tidy. Gentle. Clinical.

No more nooses. No more gasping electric chair victims convulsing before a horrified crowd. No, this is the modern era. Now, the needle slips in, and the condemned drifts off as if being tucked in for a nap they just won’t wake up from. 

This reprehensible act of violence has been redesigned to resemble a clinical procedure — and that’s not for the condemned. That’s for everyone else.

I know this because I have seen it up close. Last year, I stood inside the Texas execution chamber as a man I had known for a decade was put to death by lethal injection. He had asked me to be there. I sang to him as the drugs entered his system, as his breath slowed, as his body went still.

He told me, more than once, that if the state was going to kill him, a bullet would have been better. 

I believe him.

Lethal injection isn’t about mercy — it’s about optics. It’s about shielding witnesses from the smell of burnt flesh, and ensuring prison officials can go home and sleep at night without hearing the sound of a trapdoor swinging open in their dreams. It’s about making sure the people who vote for executions never have to think too hard about what they’re actually voting for.

Now, South Carolina is bringing back the firing squad, and here’s the thing:

I’m not mad about it.

Not because I think it’s a good idea — I don’t — but because maybe, just maybe, if people are forced to see what execution actually is, they’ll finally stop pretending it’s anything but what it has always been.

Violence.

Not justice. Not redemption. Not closure.

Just violence.

And if that’s too much to stomach, maybe the answer isn’t to look away.

Maybe the answer is to stop doing it at all.

The lie of human execution

The thing about executions is that they are, by definition, violent. You cannot kill someone in a way that is not violent. 

You can make it quieter, you can hide the worst of it, you can soften the language — but at the end of the day, a person is strapped down, and then they are dead.

Demonstrating an infinite capacity for self-deception, societies that cling to capital punishment have decided that some forms of killing are more palatable than others. The noose was ugly. The electric chair smelled awful. The gas chamber turned people’s faces purple. Then they started drooling. 

Gross.

So the process was “improved” — not for the condemned, but for those watching. Lethal injection. A neat little IV drip. Very medical. Very sanitized.

But that’s just what it looks like to the witnesses. What it feels like to the person on the table is another matter entirely. We don’t actually know, because the drugs that paralyze them also prevent them from telling us. 

What we do know is that lethal injection is botched more than any other method of execution. Sometimes it takes minutes. Sometimes hours. 

You know the only execution method used in the United States with a zero percent failure rate?

The firing squad.

This is how societies disguise violence as civility. Wrap execution in bureaucracy and call it humane. 

And now, the firing squad is back, and suddenly people are horrified again. 

Because it is undeniable. When a person is shot in the chest, there is blood. There is a body jerking against restraints. 

There is no pretending this is anything but what it is.

Maybe that’s the point.

The reality of the firing squad

Here’s how it will go down in South Carolina.

Brad Sigmon will be led into a small room. He will be strapped to a chair with a catch basin underneath (because somebody will need to clean up the mess). His arms and legs will be restrained. A hood will be pulled over his head, so the last thing he sees is not the rifles pointed at his chest but simply darkness.

A medical professional steps forward, pins a target over his heart. A bureaucratic bullseye. As if this were a carnival game.

The shooters — three of them — will stand behind a wall, peering through a slit, their weapons trained on a man who cannot move, cannot see them, cannot speak.

And then, on command, they will fire.

All three will shoot live ammunition.

If their aim is true, Sigmon’s heart will rupture and he will bleed out in seconds.

If it’s not — if something shifts at the last moment, if the bullets land just outside the target — he could linger.

The doctor will step forward, check for a pulse, declare him dead, and that will be that.

The state of South Carolina will pack up its things, call it justice, and move on.

It will be graphic. It will be violent.

An execution always is.

The real choice: confront it or own it

There are only two real choices for a society that executes people.

One: Acknowledge that killing people — no matter how it’s done — is barbaric, and stop. 

Or two: Accept it fully, with no illusions. Own it, in all its bloody, twitching, gasping reality.

There is no in-between. No middle path. No way to make an execution painless enough, silent enough, civilized enough for it to be anything other than what it is.

But what cannot be done — what has been attempted for far too long — is pretending that people can be killed nicely. That if the lights are dimmed and voices are lowered, if the right combination of chemicals is administered, if just the right number of volts is used, killing a helpless person — no matter what they have done — can ever be made humane.

One of the death penalty’s biggest threats has always been the human body refusing to die quietly.

That is why execution methods have changed again and again — because each one, eventually, becomes too much to stomach. Hangings were too gruesome. Electrocutions sounded like bacon in a frying pan. The gas chamber left people gagging.

So it was made quieter. It was sanitized. It was sterilized. 

And now, the firing squad is back, and people are appalled again.

Because when a person is shot in the chest, there is no mistaking it for something else.

There is no illusion of a gentle passing.

There is blood soaking through fabric. Broken ribs. Open flesh.

There is the undeniable, immediate reality of violence being carried out in the people’s name.

And maybe that is what it will take.

Because the thing about violence is that it does not become less violent just because you make it easier to look at.

The death penalty dies when people can no longer look away.

This is why, if I had to choose, I’d take the firing squad over lethal injection any day.

Not because I think it’s a good option. There is no good option. But at least it’s honest.

A gun is a gun. A bullet is a bullet. Nobody is pretending it’s anything else.

Lethal injection was never for the condemned. It was for the witnesses. For the prison staff. For the judges and politicians and the people at home who don’t want to think about what execution really is.

But a firing squad? That is unmistakable. That is a gun, aimed at a heart. That is a human being, restrained in a chair, waiting for the sound of the command. That is a body crumpling. That is death, in all its awful, irreversible finality.

If this is too much to stomach, don’t turn away. Stop it.

But if you believe in capital punishment?

Then watch. 🦢