I kind of suspect that this is a legal tactic, but honestly…if I were going to be executed and had the opportunity to be the last person executed by firing squad in the US, which I guess she’d have pretty decent odds of being, I think I might take it. Firing squad is probably marginally less-pleasant than lethal injection, but it’s also pretty fast, and that’s probably a record that’d last.
That being said, my understanding is that women generally don’t go in for death by firearm, so it’s kind of an unexpected request from her. One of the major reasons that women in the US have a much higher survival rate when it comes to suicide than men is that women are much more likely to use poison than firearms to kill themselves. A hospital can do a lot more about poison if they catch it in time than someone having just blown their brains out.
IIRC from past reading, that stems from the fact that guys tend to think less about how they’re gonna look afterwards, whereas women think about how they’re gonna look, say, lying in state at a funeral as a corpse.
Studies have shown that women and girls tend to have more suicidal ideation, attempts and self-injury. Men and boys are more likely to use lethal means such as firearms and, therefore, have much higher rates of suicide. Researchers have called this the “gender paradox.”
Yeah.
Oh, but…hmm. Apparently, according to the article, I am out of date on poison being the favorite route for women to do themselves in; things have shifted in the last few years.
The CDC report published Thursday, however, found firearms were the leading means of suicide for women since 2020, and suicide deaths overall among women also increased.
EDIT: Oh, wait, no, the CDC thing is on the means of successful suicide, not just all attempts. So while “firearms are now the leading method for successful suicide for women” is still a change, that’s not the same thing as being the preferred method to attempt suicide.
Could be as simple as not wanting to risk botched lethal injection. Less painfull to get shot in the head and heart. Well as long as the shooters don’t botch that, but that is rather harder to botch. Lethal injection one can botch in invisible, not immediately obvious ways.
Obviously extremely uncommon, but I remember there being some guy that survived both a firing squad’s volley and the subsequent mercy shot to the head. Might have been in…Spain?
Wenceslao Moguel Herrera (1 November 1896[1] – 29 July 1976), known in the press as El Fusilado (Spanish: “The Shot One”[a]), was a Mexican soldier under Pancho Villa who was captured on 18 March 1915 during the Mexican Revolution, and survived execution by firing squad.[2][3][4]
He was sentenced to death without a trial, and was shot 8–9 times in the body. He received the coup de grâce, or one final shot to the head at point-blank range to ensure death, yet managed to survive, though he was permanently scarred and disfigured by the event.[4][2]
Yeah… Cruelty is the point. It’s kinda ridiculous how bad the state is at killing people when they try to sanitize their actions. Any dentist could tell you how to execute a person painlessly. If you just start a normal nitrous oxide/oxygen mix and then up the nitrous to a hundred percent over time, or if you wanted to go even faster have them switch to regular nitrogen, we could avoid all this.
But I don’t think the state would allow prisoners to go out in a manor that was pleasant or even pleasurable.
I kind of suspect that this is a legal tactic, but honestly…if I were going to be executed and had the opportunity to be the last person executed by firing squad in the US, which I guess she’d have pretty decent odds of being, I think I might take it. Firing squad is probably marginally less-pleasant than lethal injection, but it’s also pretty fast, and that’s probably a record that’d last.
That being said, my understanding is that women generally don’t go in for death by firearm, so it’s kind of an unexpected request from her. One of the major reasons that women in the US have a much higher survival rate when it comes to suicide than men is that women are much more likely to use poison than firearms to kill themselves. A hospital can do a lot more about poison if they catch it in time than someone having just blown their brains out.
IIRC from past reading, that stems from the fact that guys tend to think less about how they’re gonna look afterwards, whereas women think about how they’re gonna look, say, lying in state at a funeral as a corpse.
searches
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2024/09/26/firearms-suicide-deaths-women-cdc/75353527007/
Yeah.
Oh, but…hmm. Apparently, according to the article, I am out of date on poison being the favorite route for women to do themselves in; things have shifted in the last few years.
EDIT: Oh, wait, no, the CDC thing is on the means of successful suicide, not just all attempts. So while “firearms are now the leading method for successful suicide for women” is still a change, that’s not the same thing as being the preferred method to attempt suicide.
Could be as simple as not wanting to risk botched lethal injection. Less painfull to get shot in the head and heart. Well as long as the shooters don’t botch that, but that is rather harder to botch. Lethal injection one can botch in invisible, not immediately obvious ways.
Obviously extremely uncommon, but I remember there being some guy that survived both a firing squad’s volley and the subsequent mercy shot to the head. Might have been in…Spain?
searches
Mexico.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenceslao_Moguel
Jesus, and he lived over 60 years after that!
Chumbawamba wrote a fucking song about him?! How did I not know this? It’s like hearing the story from a barbershop quartet.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=lPVhWFbAO4E
Yeah… Cruelty is the point. It’s kinda ridiculous how bad the state is at killing people when they try to sanitize their actions. Any dentist could tell you how to execute a person painlessly. If you just start a normal nitrous oxide/oxygen mix and then up the nitrous to a hundred percent over time, or if you wanted to go even faster have them switch to regular nitrogen, we could avoid all this.
But I don’t think the state would allow prisoners to go out in a manor that was pleasant or even pleasurable.
I say take me out the way they do cattle: bolt gun right through the skull.