Hook
The Justice Department announced this week it will allow firing squads for federal executions. This isn’t a return to some preferred method. It’s what happens when the supply chain for lethal injection drugs collapses and the state still wants to execute people.
Why does method matter at all if the outcome is the same? The how of killing exposes the gap between what states claim to value and what constraints actually force them to do.
Constraint Drives Method
Start with the practical reality: pharmaceutical companies stopped selling execution drugs to American prisons. Not all at once. Gradually. European manufacturers refused first, citing human rights obligations. Then American companies followed, worried about brand damage and employee objections. By 2020, sodium thiopental (the first drug in the three-drug lethal injection protocol) had become nearly impossible to source.
States didn’t abandon execution. They switched methods. Some bought drugs from compounding pharmacies, which aren’t regulated the same way. Others changed their statutes to allow gas chambers or electric chairs. Now the federal government is adding firing squads to the list of approved methods.
Policy isn’t just ideology. It’s shaped by who controls the inputs. When pharmaceutical companies exited the execution business, they didn’t end capital punishment. They forced a redesign. The method states called most civilized became unavailable not because states changed their minds about it, but because the manufacturers controlling the supply decided not to participate.
Method follows constraint. When the preferred technology disappears, systems either stop or adapt. The American execution system adapted.
Making Death Presentable
Societies that execute people care deeply about method. Not for the person being killed. For everyone else.
Every shift in execution method has been sold as progress toward something less disturbing to watch. Public hangings gave way to private ones. Hangings gave way to electric chairs, which were supposed to be instantaneous and painless. Electric chairs gave way to gas chambers. Gas chambers gave way to lethal injections, which looked the most like medical procedures and the least like violence.
Each transition claimed to reduce suffering. Each was designed to be more palatable to the society authorizing the killing.
Lethal injection looked clean. The condemned person lay on a gurney. An IV delivered drugs. It resembled surgery, not execution. The violence was chemical and invisible.
But between 1982 and 2024, the Death Penalty Information Center documented 47 executions that were visibly, undeniably botched. The first drug is supposed to render the person unconscious. If the dose is wrong or the IV infiltrates the tissue instead of the vein, the second drug (which paralyzes) and third drug (which stops the heart) are administered while the person is aware but unable to move or speak. Witnesses report gasping, convulsions, and executions lasting over an hour.
The system wasn’t designed to minimize the condemned person’s suffering. It was designed to minimize the observers’ discomfort. Every method advertised as more civilized has meant one thing: a way to let the society executing someone tell itself it isn’t being cruel.
Second Order Effects
When the technology for the preferred method disappeared, states faced a choice: stop executing people, or use a different method.
Most chose the latter. They didn’t abandon capital punishment when lethal injection drugs became scarce. They revised statutes to authorize older methods. Oklahoma authorized nitrogen gas in 2015 and added firing squads in the same year. Idaho, Mississippi, and South Carolina followed. The federal government is now doing the same.
Watch what happened. When pharmaceutical companies exited the market, they created a filter. They didn’t end executions. They forced states to use methods that don’t depend on controlled substances. Firing squads require rifles and ammunition, both widely available. No supply chain to squeeze. No manufacturers who can refuse.
The policy restriction didn’t stop the practice. It changed the mechanics. And in changing the mechanics, it stripped away the medical veneer that made lethal injection easier for the public to accept. Firing squads are visibly violent. There’s no pretense that this is anything other than state killing.
That’s the second-order effect. When you restrict the method that looks like medicine, you force visibility. That visibility hasn’t changed public opinion yet. But the constraint did what direct advocacy couldn’t: it removed the option to make execution look like something other than what it is.
Close
You can make state killing invisible until someone cuts the supply line.