by What is the best way to kill a man with the least effort on our part and that would give him the quickest, most painless, end — while saving us the most money?
We want out killing to be economically efficient. We don’t want to spend any more than necessary to find our man’s end.
The Death Penalty in the USA doesn’t appear to be about the quickest way to kill a man. We have used the electric chair, the gas chamber, firing squad, lethal injection and the noose and they’re all sloppy, expensive, painful and time-intensive methods of killing.
Of all the memes of killing, the firing squad is closest to being the perfect way to kill man — but aiming for the heart is more romantic than physiologically effective.
Isn’t a bullet in the back of the brain the quickest, cleanest, and cheapest way to kill a man?
Why are we scared of a bullet to the back of the head? Is it a feral weakness in us that we, as the punishers, know there is no escape from a dead mind — and so we actively choose to propagate the fantasy that, even if the body dies, the mind remains alive, even if only momentarily, beyond the last heartbeat?
Are we fearful of the Old West cowardice that you “never shoot a man in the back?”
Do we try to keep out valor alive in the eyes of the dead and within the living watchers by aiming for the heart, the sympathetic nervous system, and lungs — instead of the much more efficient killing method of a bullet to the back of the head?
One bullet. One death. One world.
That’s how you kill a man.
I wonder if some people would consider that cruel and unusual punishment because a minority of people are ‘lucky’ and do not die when shot like that but somehow miraculously survive, albeit in a lot of pain?
Don’t you think a professionally placed bullet to the back of the head would stand a greater chance at killing a man, Gordon, than say a firing squad or a hemp noose or suffocation during lethal injection or holding your breath in the gas chamber or a third-degree charring in the electric chair?