re: #264 goddamnedfrank

All your examples are intended to leave a very graphic and public message. Beheading is very conducive to that. The few democracies that still have the death penalty have learned to keep their executions far away from direct view. If we hung corpses in public like Iran does or carried out lethal injections in soccer stadiums they’d be seen by far more people as intended to generate fear of the government.

That’s kind of my point. If there weren’t something extra-specially frightening/barbaric about it, it wouldn’t be such a graphic message. A dozen bullet-riddled bodies in the desert would be no less frightening than a dozen headless bodies.