Next month this murderer will be strapped to a chair with a target pinned over his heart, and shot by five riflemen with silver bullets.Eh..?
Did he commit his murder on all fours, by the light of a full moon?
The marksmen - trained volunteers drawn from the local police force - will use .30 calibre Winchester rifles and silver-tipped bullets, popular with local hunters tracking deer and black bears in the nearby mountains.Ah. No, just 'Daily Fail' journalistic license.
Three seconds on Google would have told the reporter that 'silver-tipped' is just a name, too...
11 comments:
Do you get the feeling the senior Mail reporters have all gone to the seaside for the weekend and left some over-enthusiastic junior in charge?
It was, after all, last August's bank holiday that produced the unforgettable headline 'Diet-mad Cheeky Girls Reveal How They Turned Yellow and Grew Fur'.
Greece has the same problem. Oh no wait those are loan arrangers aren't they.
Mainly Fail - "Only four of the shooters, however, will have live rounds in their weapons. Neither Gardner nor the shooters will know which of them has the blank cartridge, ensuring no one can be sure who fires the fatal rounds."
Spoken like someone who's never fired a gun. Sure, Gardner won't know (well, duh) but I can almost guarantee that the guy with the blank round will know. I know from personal experience that there's quite a difference between live rounds and blanks at 7.62mm and .303 inch, and I reckon the .30 rifles they're going to use will be the same.
Incidentally, doesn't that mean they're going to hand over pre-loaded weapons to the firing squad? I was always taught that firearms being handed from one person to another should be unloaded and shown to be so. That's poor range safety in my opinion and if they're not careful they could end up shooting somebody ;-)
I'm just pleased to see another waste of DNA and oxygen being sent on his way!
AE - with you on the blanks, though I think it's some kind of US legal business to do with individual reponsibility rather than sparing the poor guys' feelings; it doesn't matter if they know, so long as they don't officially know, if you see what I mean.
I wonder whether a firing squad has to fill out a risk assessment form...
And the target is a slightly baroque touch, don't you think? After all, a trained marksman should know where to aim.
It is nevertheless true that tonto is Spanish for "stupid".
Why the hankie?
At 20 feet, even a crap shot should be able to him in the eye, 99 times out of 100?
Still, seems a reasonable method to me. Quick, cheap and with a deterrent effect as well. What more could you ask for?
"Do you get the feeling the senior Mail reporters have all gone to the seaside for the weekend and left some over-enthusiastic junior in charge?"
Pretty much every day, actually...
"Greece has the same problem. Oh no wait those are loan arrangers aren't they."
Heh!
"I know from personal experience that there's quite a difference between live rounds and blanks at 7.62mm and .303 inch, and I reckon the .30 rifles they're going to use will be the same."
I've heard that said about firing squads quite a lot, but never in the main body of these sorts of articles, only in the comments.
As MacHeath points out, it's like a nice fairy tale everyone agrees to believe in and doesn't like to think too much about...
"...the target is a slightly baroque touch, don't you think? After all, a trained marksman should know where to aim."
Another purely visual piece of theatre, to reassure onlookers..?
The target isn't to make the guys in the firing squad aim at a lethal point. It's to make them aim at the same lethal point. They're also going for a chest shot not because, as the article suggests, they might miss a head shot (at 20 feet, a halfway-decent shooter can cut a paper clip in half using iron sights) but because four battle rifle bullets point-blank simultaneously on a human head will make it burst. With the usual journalistic cluelessness about firearms, it just says '30 calibre hunting rifles'. That probably means Win .308, which is near-identical to NATO 7.62x51. But shooting someone in the head with one of those (let alone four) at twenty feet would be so horrific for the spectators that many of them would be severely traumatised. If you want, you can go Googling for what full calibre headshots look like, but I wouldn't recommend it.
"The target isn't to make the guys in the firing squad aim at a lethal point. It's to make them aim at the same lethal point."
I remember reading somewhere that if (by accident, or design) the WWI firing squads tasked with shooting deserters all missed or failed to make a clean kill, the chap in charge was under orders to finish the job with his service revolver.
I wonder if that holds true for modern day executions?
"...shooting someone in the head with one of those (let alone four) at twenty feet would be so horrific for the spectators that many of them would be severely traumatised."
Quite. Wouldn't do to upset the press, after all.
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