In some ways, the U.S. has done to executions and automated foreign assassinations what the supermarket has done to eating meat. We are distanced from the act so that we aren't overly burdened thinking about about what is done in our names, both as citizens and voters. Hence, we do not oppose something that we normally would, were we only more aware of it.
Oklahoma's being sued by the ACLU and newspapers because the state restricted the press's access to what was happening during Claton Lockett's botched execution:
People sometimes forget that while the press is often accused of being lurid and prurient, they do actually serve a civic function. (Or really, the Press is an overly broad category, and there are good investigative journalists whom people throw under the bus because CNN is terrible)
I don't think so. You're dramatizing both situations, I assume based on personal bias.
The US executes about 40x people per year (with a brief higher spike in the late '90s and early '00s); in the 1980s it was maybe 15 to 20 per year.
Texas accounts for not quite half of that.
So remind me again how your statement is meaningful among a population of 317+ million in which the radical majority of Americans live in states that either have abolished executions or execute people very rarely.
How is that some kind of large scale desensitized system of execution? Where are the thousands of annual executions that would take place in such an actual case of desensitization?
