Although I’m not a gun owner or enthusiast, I’ve done a fair bit of shooting, and I’ve slaughtered and butchered farm animals for food. I agree with Crafter Man - I think there’s a fundamental difference between this and executing a person. Honestly, I’m surprised at how many people think they could (and would) do it.
I lurk at a gun forum. It’s sickening the attitudes I see there (when I have the stomach to go). Not only are there people who ‘could and would’ do it, they’d be proud to do it – as if executing ‘scum’ will raise their status in their communities. And it’s not just people who committed heinous crimes they want to execute. I’ve seen calls there for ‘open season’ on illegal immigrants and homosexuals.
I am on this message board and it is appalling the attitudes I see on here every day. The horror… I can not believe the number of people who do not see the world exactly as I see it… :smack: 
:rolleyes:
I believe that I’m responsible for my own actions, and just following orders doesn’t relieve me of my own set of ethics.
To preface: I am a gun owner who target shoots occasionally, has field dressed hunted prey, who grew up in a rural area, shot varmints that were eating her garden and has participated in the slaughter of animals for food. I’m no stranger to firearms or the taking of animal life.
I am rather certain that I could shoot someone who was endangering my life, that of someone I loved or someone with no other defenses.
I believe that I could serve on a firing squad, but only with the option to turn down any case in which I thought that there was a chance that the condemned was innocent.
missred (female)
I’m sorry but your post is just a little bit incoherent to say the least.
I might try to address your concerns(Or I might consider it a waste of my time) if you could post them lucidly but as it stands it appears to be a rambling rant that hasn’t really been thought out.
I can see the attempt at raising a straw man but quite honestly the rest ofyour post is incomprehensible.
Perhaps you were feeling tired and confused when you posted it ?
Try reposting the point that you’re trying to make a little more clearly and I might take the time out to answer you.
(No promises mind)
A. I support DP and would shoot
B. I oppose DP and would not shoot
C. I support DP but would not shoot
D. I oppose DP but would shoot
Everyone has posted as either A or B. Lust4Life’s post castigated C. Hal Briston noted the absence of C among our respondents. The closest thing was The will to shoot an armed intruder, but objecting to executing a confined prisoner.
L4L, you used the word “you” to describe C. If that means
society in general should either drop the DP or construct a multimillion seat stoning stadium, I agree. But if you’re pointing fingers at us here, we think your aim is off.
No my aim isn’t off.
Reread my post.
There are a number of posters who say that no one should ever kill another human being under any circumstances and that there will never be any valid justification for doing so.
Yet these peoples lives and society are only made possible by other people being prepared to do that very thing on their behalf, even if they don’t actually like doing so.
These people are L.E.O.s and members of the armed forces or even on occassion members of the intelligence services.
Many of these people rationalise their beleifs by saying “Oh no I never asked them to do that”, or “They’re not doing that on my behalf I can assure you”.
And no doubt being safely disconnected from the realities of those actions in their everyday lives actually believe what they’re saying.
Right up to their being in a situation where they have the choice of an L.E.O. shooting dead a deranged gunman, or the gunman killing either themselves or their loved ones.
Anyone who chooses the latter when confronted by the choice I.RL. has my total and absaloute respect even though I disagree with them.
But I suspect that many people who kid themselves about how they could never ever advocate the taking of human life; do so knowing that they are unlikely to be in that situation and so can wash their hands of their share of the responsibility.
Shooting a murderer by firing squad is no different from shooting a murderer on a killing rampage from an ethical point of view.
I think that many of the posters are hypocrites, unconscious hypocrites but hypocrites none the less.
I’ll bite the bullet [sic] and go for D.
If the death penalty is going to happen, better to have someone who isn’t all “Yeehaw” about it but will do it with respect and care for the person being executed (I almost typed “victim” but that’s an entirely different argument).
Could I do it? There’s no knowing until my eye is on the sight and my finger is on the trigger.
Yeah, those guys freak me the hell out too. Fortunately, they aren’t really representative of the gun owner population as a whole (mostly because the majority of us avoid those forums like the plague.)
So here’s my question: What do you propose those people who you think are unconscious hypocrites do to resolve their supposed hypocrisy? What course of action should they be taking?
You may well be a better person than I, sir.
It’s easy to be a hero on the Internet. 
That makes little to no sense to me.
I should be grateful that people killed other people, or were willing to kill other people so that I could live? If I didn’t live I wouldn’t know in the first place. I don’t want anyone to kill other people for me anyway. If people would stop all this blood lust in the first place nobody would need to be killed.
But this isn’t about respecting the military and the people who choose to serve. This is about executing people already in prison. Nobody is a hypocrite if they’re against this. I’m grateful for those who work to make my community a better place, and that includes the military, the doctors and sanitation workers, the people who voluntarily get out and help those in need, the immigrants who build and keep the city in good repair.
If it was up to me, instead of executing people I’d have them working their asses off for their meals in any way they’re fit to work. To many of them working hard is a fate worse than death. Executing people doesn’t do a damned thing to discourage crime, it doesn’t improve the country in any way I can see. What is the point other than blood lust and revenge? I don’t know, personally, so I’m not willing to pull the trigger. If someone else chooses to, that’s their affair. Being against it personally does not make one a hypocrite. It’s the ones who are all FOR the death penalty but wouldn’t be comfortable pulling the trigger themselves who are hypocrites but even then it’s understandable. I like chicken too but I don’t really want to be the one doing the plucking.
Me personally, I have not had an easy life. There is a person who was given the responsibility of raising and protecting his child who chose to hurt me in the worst possible way at the tender age of six. When I was younger I fantasized about killing him. But now that I’m older I don’t even want to see him dead. I just want to not ever see him again. Now if I’ve suffered this pain which has messed with me my whole life…I wouldn’t say ruined it but I constantly fight falling in to total fucked-upness for 40 years because of what he did…if I don’t want to see this man killed I can’t muster up the anger to want anyone else killed either.
Depends who is on the receiving end. There are people who I could shoot without thinking twice, but they are people I hate for one reson or another. Random strangers? Nope, couldn’t do that.
I don’t see anything wrong with recovering organs from executed prisoners, provided they’re healthy enough to qualify as donors. Of course, Larry Niven warned us about that practice, so we’d better proceed cautiously.
Every lawyer, judge, and bailiff working the courtroom for or against Wanda Jean got paid, every single time her case was appealed. Maybe they ain’t rich, but they’re certainly not poor. Let’s be clear about Wanda Jean though - she murdered someone, and the state ordered her executed. The appeals and attempts to prevent her execution were not based on her innocence of the crime for which she had been convicted.
All in all, I think our system has safeguards and activists enough that I probably wouldn’t have to shoot more than a dozen people in my entire career (here in California, anyway). And of that dozen heinous murderers and rapists and bankers, I don’t think the odds are that good one of them would be “innocent”.
For what it’s worth, I think guys like Bernie Madoff and Ken Lay should be executed too - they ruined far more lives than Wanda Jean did. If it was possible to pin down the financial wizards who crash-dived our economy so they could have bigger super-yachts, I’d put them against the wall too (on charges of treason, maybe, since their acts threatened the nation as a whole… but that’d be a hard sell. And douchebaggery is still not a crime, let alone a capital offense).
Let’s expand the hypothetical a bit and see if you might change your mind. What if the deal was as stipulated in the OP, but instead of the $100k shooting-bonus, you were permitted to refuse any execution, provided you could show reasonable doubt about the condemned prisoner’s guilt?
I was raised by a Mennonite woman in a Mennonite town, and the only church I’ve ever belonged to is the Mennonite church. There people are my second cousins. It’s not so hard to believe there are people in the world who aren’t living their life by “an eye for an eye,” is it?
You do raise some good points, but I still wouldn’t serve on a firing squad, because just because someone did the act that they were convicted of, doesn’t necessarily make them completely culpable for it.
And even though it doesn’t hurt my heart or anything for a sociopath to be executed, I still don’t think it’s good practice.
As far as Wanda Jean’s appeals, yes, the judges and lawyers and everyone were making a decent living, but they had their jobs regardless of what happened to her. Nobody was making a name for themselves (as far as I know) or getting rich based on any particular result.
I definitely agree that we need to look at slightly less direct forms of fucking up society, like Madoff and Lay, instead of mainly focusing on people like Wanda Jean. I still don’t think they should be executed, but punished in proportion to the damage they caused.
I also agree with you that few or no death row inmates are actually innocent of the crime they were convicted of. The system does work to SOME extent, SOMETIMES. If there is a clear doubt, I think that is usually rectified (I mean only in death penalty cases, at some point during the appeal process). But again, someone like Wanda Jean who has brain damage may not be completely culpable even if she did commit the action (and it seems to be very clear that she did). But she fell through the cracks because of the way the system works at present, and that never should have happened. That doesn’t erase her culpability, but it does mitigate it.
Assasins don’t even make that kind of money and have to kill innocent people.
Well even if the state didn’t pay as well as in the OP, you could always write a memoir and make a bundle off of that. I’m thinking Assassin For The State. Or you could write a self-help book called Shooting For Success.
I could do it, and would, with very little problem. Maybe that’s cause I support the death penalty.
Or it could be that I’m ex-USA Infantry, and was trained repeatedly to shoot at humanlike targets without even thinking about it. Of course, I never had to serve in combat, so I have no way of knowing how efficacious that training actually was…