The American prison system is probably the only place in the country where you can’t find enough drugs to overdose. Once again, states, terrified they’ll run out of the drugs they need to kill death row inmates are searching for, er, creative solutions to the problem.
In Utah, they figure they’ll go back to the firing squad, a perfectly 19th-century way of killing. The kill squad will be chosen from among police officers.
“We’ve always had a lot more volunteers than we’ve actually had spots,” giggled Utah Republican Rep. Paul Ray.
Great. Given the choice, police officers will volunteer in droves to kill a defenseless man. Makes you re-think Ferguson, Mo., doesn’t it?
Turns out European manufacturers are getting all weepy about selling the United States the component drugs used to make a lethal injection cocktail. Yeah, they won’t sell America poison for the same reason it’s illegal to sell liquor to 12-year-olds, because they can’t handle the stuff.
Great. Now, we’re taking civilization lessons from the Germans.
How long before we’re hanging people again? If a firing squad is American (and it must be, because it involves guns) how much more American is hanging, the favorite judicial punishment of the Old West when hardly anyone could read and a good 25 percent of the population had untreated syphilis?
Those were the days. You wanted to hang someone; you hanged him. And don’t believe those movies in which the sheriff faces down the lynch mob with only his six-gun and his badge. Back in the Old West, the sheriff was far more likely to choose safety over honor and slip out the back door while a howling mob of illiterate, possibly syphilitic townsfolk swung their quarry from a tree.
All over America, we can’t figure out how to house the homeless, feed the hungry, teach kids to read, get treatment for drug addicts, help the impoverished elderly people and provide jobs for working-class people.
We’re not too worried about that, either. You want to make a capitalist omelet; you’ve got to break some people.
But you do not tell Americans we can’t kill people. Not that. Not ever. We run out of poison, we’ll shoot ‘em. We run out of bullets, we’ll hang ‘em. We run out of rope, we’ll beat the accused to death with a shovel. We will, by God, rend and tear the flesh of murderers with our teeth until we have eaten a path through their living tissue and we can, at last, bite their hearts in two and end their murdering little lives.
Of course, a lot of the stuff I said in the above paragraph is ridiculous. This is America. We’re never going to run out of bullets.
Marc Munroe Dion is a
nationally syndicated columnist. Dion's latest book "Volume I," a "best of" collection of Dion's 2014 columns, is available for Nook and Kindle.