Utah's state House votes 39-34 to reinstitute execution by firing squad

[ag]

Great news! It is both more humane and much harder for foreign powers to interfere with than lethal injection.

I see you have the affinity for the traditional Soviet method.  Proper Communist upbringing!

Well, you know, you can take the boy out of the Soviet Union, but...

[ag]

Far more humane than the lethal injection. Death comes pretty fast. It's also fairly painless if you do it right.

Why assume that it would be "done right"? That's at odds with the frequent mistakes that American executioners make while using other methods to kill people.

Well I'm assuming the firing squad will be made of people with military training, or another type of background that entails learning to shoot straight.

The most efficient way involves the executioner walking the condemned in front of him and then blowing his brains out point blank. That is how Comrade Stalin liked it. That is how they, most likely, did my great grand father. June 2, 1939 Butovo cemetery.

[ag]

I don't understand why we need violent ways of capital punishment.

...As opposed to non-violent ways of killing people?

We tried. Then Europe got upset about it. I think one reason they're considering this is because European drug manufacturers are refusing to export to the United States sodium thiopental and other lethal-injection drugs.

I did not realize US had no pharmaceutical industry of its own. We now know the full-proof way Europe can make US succumb to its demands: ban Tylenol exports.

[ag]

I don't understand why we need violent ways of capital punishment.

...As opposed to non-violent ways of killing people?

We tried. Then Europe got upset about it. I think one reason they're considering this is because European drug manufacturers are refusing to export to the United States sodium thiopental and other lethal-injection drugs.

I did not realize US had no pharmaceutical industry of its own. We now know the full-proof way Europe can make US succumb to its demands: ban Tylenol exports.

Big pharma is multinational and for tax reasons is usually incorporated in a low tax European state such as Ireland.  But even if it weren't, the desire to sell in European markets would keep them from wanted to sell their drugs for executions.

Wasn't the biggest argument against health reform that the high margins in the American market drive the product innovation, which the socialized European medicine, with its low profits would not generate? Or am I forgetting something?

Anyway, poisons are among the oldest pharmaceuticals known to humanity. To produce generic versions of a few chemicals, which have, mostly, been in public domain for generations, you do not need to be "big pharma". You are not talking of a cure for mallaria here.

[ag]

we're talking not merely chemicals, but drugs which accordingly have to manufactured according to regulation and certified as such. 

This

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pharmaceutical_companies_of_the_United_States

is an incomplete list of US pharmaceutical companies. You are telling me none of them are capable of producing drugs "according to regulations, and certified as such"? What ARE they doing then?

Push comes to shove, the government of the state of Texas could set up a little factory, if it really wanted. I know, that is socialism - but, hey, they do have SOME government departments there, don´t they?

[ag]

 it certainly is odd that those who oppose capital punishment under any circumstances are seeking to prevent more humane methods of execution from being used in hopes that by making executions less humane they will be ended,

They are, merely, following an advice of a wise old man, not to "tinker with the machinery of death".

I am sure you would be able to find many ways of doing disgusting things more humanely. For instance, if you give a woman some pills she could be raped without remembering it - arguably, she would be better off. But I somehow doubt you would be in favor of supplying those drugs to potential rapists - or would you?

If you want to go on executing people, do it yourself. As far as those strange foreigners are concerned, the difference between the electric chair and the lethal injection is pretty much irrelevant.

[ag]

You continue to ignore the point that the market for execution pharmaceuticals is so small, it makes no sense to set up a company that does only that.  Were any of those companies you pointed out were to openly admit they did so, they'd lose so much other business that they'd lose money.

Also, where would the State of Texas obtain the precursor chemicals under your scenario? The ostracism that affects drug companies presently would affect their suppliers as well if they sold to Texas to make drugs for executions.  To set up the facilities that produced drugs and their precursor chemicals only for executions would be hideously expensive.  It's not as if even Texas is executing people at a rate that would make doing so feasible.

If the State of Texas believes it is important to kill people in that way, it should pay. It is not that every other part of the death penalty process were not hideously expensive. Why should the drugs be any cheaper than the death row?  What are a few million dollars here or there? I am sure they could endow a Chair of Human Poisoning in some public university within the state, and the happy Texan professor chosen to fill it would do proper supervision. There is no magic involved in production of pharmaceuticals - it is done by regular humans, you do not have to have gone to Hogwarts to do it. And the quantities, as you say, are small: you do not need to scale the process up from a university lab, and those are pretty good in producing appropriate compounds and testing for quality.

All this whining about "bad foreigners refusing to participate in how we kill people, so they are guilty of us doing this in a crueler fashion than we want to" is ridiculous. To begin with, those foreigners do not care a fig about HOW you kill people. It is YOU who are worrying about "humane" methods of execution: not them. Nobody wants you to kill people "less painfully" - they want you to stop killing people, period. If making this appear a medical procedure makes you sleep sounder, nobody else thinks this is a positive development: they do not want you to sleep after an execution at all. If it becomes very expensive - well, nobody else asked you to do it, it is your problem. If saving money is more important than sound sleep - well, fine, it is your decision, do it the way you like. Just stop whining that nobody else wants to take part in the performance. It is your show: you do the honors, you pay the bill, and you do your prayer to whatever gods you have. All up to you and your laws.  Just don´t get excited about others thinking you are barbarians for doing it: you said you do not care about it so many times, we all believe you.

[ag]

Honestly, the idea that execution of all things should somehow be made 'non-gruesome', as if its 'gruesomeness' has anything at all to do with what's really happening, is possibly even more repulsive and anti-human than the insistence on executing people is itself.

The one positive of it being gruesome is that seeing the gore of a person executed by firing squad is a reminder of just how violent it is to kill someone made clearer than in a lethal injection. Here there is no sugar coating it.

Do you mean they are going to televise them?