403: The Death Penalty and Forgiveness
The other day I was sitting around with a few people and one person was reading/mentioning an article about a state that was considering bringing back the firing squad for an option in acting out the death penalty. This spurred an interesting discussion. One person mentioned that in such a situation of a firing squad, one person was always handed a gun that was a blank, yet out of all the shooters, no one knew which was had the blank and which one had the loaded gun. In this, it was so that the shooters did not feel guilty or have to face that they may have been the one to in fact shot the bullet that killed another human being. I thought this was absolutely fascinating – that it’s the concern for the shooters and their potential guilt and regret for participating in a firing squad, that one of the guns would be shooting a blank. Does this not in fact reveal how the very act of the death penalty, and the firing squad specifically, is not an act that is in any way righteous or ju...