Execution by firing squad

I am not in favour of it at all, but at least with the guillotine you can't survive that, so you won't get a messy execution that's gone wrong.

First off, I'll say that I'm against the death penalty, but if we're living in a world where it exists, lets explore this idea.

Both lethal injection and firing squad are pretty inhumane. In the case of lethal injection, the way you die is that your diaphragm (the muscle that allows you to inflate and deflate your lungs) gets paralyzed. You're just straight up not able to move your lungs, and you suffocate.

A bullet can be extremely humane, but a firing squad involves a bunch of guys pointing guns at you, all but one of them with blanks (the idea is that they'll never know who actually shot the bullet that killed the person, so they'll have clean consciousnesses). If the guy with the live bullet doesn't hit you in the right spot, you'll be writhing in agony while a doctor confirms that you're still alive and you wait for a supervising officer to come and shoot you again.

If anyone here ends up on death row, I'd recommend that you take the electric chair. Not the greatest way to go, but it still beats firing squad and lethal injection.

Personally, I don't see this great need to be kind to someone being executed. They have undoubtedly caused others a great deal of pain in the commission of the crime and the aftermath.
I think the fair and just way to decide on the method of execution would be to let the victim and/or their relatives decide how the perpetrator should die.
Enough of being sweet, considerate and gentle to the scum of the earth.

Is it normal that I have a certain nostalgia for the gallows? I guess I'm just an old softy, "hang em high!"

I think lethal injection is still the best way to go. Do the math and give them enough to kill a horse.

I say that the person on death row is normally their because they killed someone else, so way should we care about this scum. Kill him in the cheapest way you can find and the world will be a better for it. I know a lot of you guys would disagree with me but that is how I feel.

I think the whole conversation is a bit of a red herring. The outcome is the same no matter what method you use (i.e. the person dies). Some methods of execution might be a little bit more painful than others, but to focus on that small difference in pain is to ignore the elephant in the room: the outcome of death is a far greater suffering than any momentary pain, so much so that the method is utterly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Choosing a less painful method doesn't give you any moral high ground.

If, for some reason, the pain is what interests you though, there are plenty of painless ways to kill a person. Do it with drugs like they do in Dignitas. Buy the drugs from people who actually want them to be used for that purpose, and have them administered by someone who doesn't believe it's wrong. This ought to be really simple.

I don't think firing squads were much better at providing sure, quick death than other methods of execution, and it's brutal and messy. I don't understand why they don't just administer a heavy dose of anesthetic to put the person to sleep. Then administer the lethal drug. That way the person is unconscious if the lethal drug takes longer than expected to do its job.

I am against the death penalty except in cases where the criminal is incurable and remorseless. However, if you have to kill, why not just invent a captive bolt gun (not to be confused with mushroom—head captive bolt, which only stun) for prisoners. It gives them an instantaneous, humane death.

Big name pharmaceutical companies do not want their names associated with lethal products. It sort of makes sense since they spend billions to build up brand names. It isn't that they are for or against the death penalty.