Held Responsible For Your Crimes

Utah recently executed a guy by firing squad, and they used that old technique where one of the five shooters was randomly loaded with a blank; that way, none of the shooters will know for sure if they fired a lethal bullet.  This underscores the moral evasiveness of the death penalty:  even the executioner gets to avoid the visceral guilt of having killed a man.  

If society were honest with itself, the executioners would know for a fact they'd killed someone, and those executioners would not be professionals, they'd be regular citizens randomly selected from the voting rolls (in the manner of jury duty).  That way, none of the voters will know for sure if they'll have to physically kill someone, reintroducing the visceral conscience into the voters' decision.  

According to the justice system, hiring a hit-man is just as bad as (or worse than) killing someone yourself, and not that legality always equates with morality, but most people agree that, in this case, the equivalency makes sense.  By that standard, sanctioning a man's execution by supporting the death penalty is morally equivalent to (or worse than) actually shooting the man yourself.  If your visceral conscience tells you that you can't pull the trigger, it should also tell you that you can't support the death penalty; if there's any discrepancy, it's because you're evading your conscience. 

This probably calls to mind the idea that meat-eaters should be willing to, at least once, kill the animal themselves.  When people object to this idea, they usually say "But I love bacon..."  Well at least they're admitting that they're full of shit.

In Utah, the sex dungeon is used for executions.