Two suppliers (one US and one Israeli) went out of production. The third and last is in Europe and the EU has a ban of exporting drugs for executions.
The real problem (again avoiding the whole capital punishment debate) is that the laws named the specific drugs to be used in lethal injections, without allowing for substitution. A single clause, "or a substitute approved by the office of the Governor" and none of this would be necessary.
Apparently the specific chemical is defined in the death penalty laws. You can't legally use a substitute.
The only solution is to change the law, but unless you have a solid block majority of every chamber, plus an unbeatable lead in the polls, chances are no politician wants to touch that.
The crazy thing is that the drugs used in lethal injection are about the worst, most Rube Goldberg way to "put someone down". A rare anaesthetic, then a muscle-relaxant, and then a chemical to explode the cells in the heart. If you get the levels of any chemical wrong (most commonly the anaesthetic) you subject the prisoner to the most painful experience any human can possibly have. The stuff vets use (Somulose) is a single injection, works every time. Simple, safer, and widely available.
And another thirty to vent the nitrogen [*] before sending in the doctor to confirm the death. Otherwise you'll have another death on your hands. Probably several, before someone realises what's going on.
Seriously, happens when farmers repair leaking metal water tanks. The newly exposed metal insta-rusts, using up the oxygen in the air in the tank, the farmer dies. His son or hand sees him collapse, thinks he's having a heart attack, jumps in and dies too. Happens in ships' ballasts too, for the same reason.
You don't need to vent an entire room, just feed the nitrogen into a simple breathing mask, with a bellows to ensure they are getting the nitrogen only.
(Bottle of nitrogen, gas bubbler to warm and humidify the gas, bellows, plastic mask, plastic tubing. Dead in 30 seconds. Bam. Done.)
I'd have the judge execute the prisoner, but only after being required to spend 30 days with them. (Separated only as much as needed for security.) If the judge has second thoughts, he can reverse the jury's verdict, call for a new trial, or commute the sentence. This would serve in place of the entire appeals process.
If the judge still believes the prisoner is guilty, the prisoner is strapped down on a table and the judge stabs him through the heart with a long thin dagger. Quick, clean, ceremonial.
Worse case, it at least saves money. Best case, it summons Cthulhu.
Most firing squads are just regular soldiers or guards called up. They aren't paid executioners. In the case of soldiers, they might be firing upon a fellow soldier, wearing the same uniform, who just two or three days before was sharing the same trench.
Since these are essentially one-shot guns. If you are making your own ammunition, why not make a muzzle loader? Saves a lot of hassle making the ammunition. Powder, ball-bearing, wadding. Use an electric (piezo) ignition instead of a match or flint-strike.
Is there really a risk of "organised crime groups" making plastic guns?
The "Liberator" 3d zip-gun can fire one shot at a time. It's smooth bore [*], limiting it's accuracy and hence range. Even when made by a high-end sintered powder commercial 3d printer, they tend to fail quickly when firing full-power rounds (so are usually tested with low-powered cartridges.) After a few rounds, the barrel melts and deforms enough to crack, and if you keep firing, it will eventually fail completely. Depending on how it fails, it may blow your hand off.
To reload it, you have to unscrew the barrel, poke out the spent cartridge with a rod (it will jam in the barrel due to the melted plastic), then put in a new cartridge, screw the barrel back in the gun-body, cock the firing pin, and then you're ready to fire. In a video some months back, it took about 20 seconds per round, during which time you would be, in effect, unarmed. That means, of course, that in reality you have only one shot.
[* One experimenter found that his version kept failing, so he put "rifling" in it and it worked. But I suspect all he did was make vents that bled off part of the gas, reducing the pressure enough to prevent immediate barrel failure. That, of course, will cut the range/power dramatically. It may have also loosened the firing path for the slug, preventing jamming in the barrel. Basically he made it sloppier so it wouldn't explode.]
You can use much simpler tools to make a one-shot, smooth-bore, take-apart-to-reload, zip-gun like the 3d-printed guns, starting with off-the-shelf parts and very limited tools and experience. A zip-gun just need a barrel (pipe), a firing chamber (thicker walled pipe), a firing pin (nail on a spring). Buy pre-threaded pipe and you don't even need welding experience.
Hell, you can probably make one out of plastic without too much difficulty. I suspect you can buy higher grade plastic tubing that is stronger and more heat-tolerant than anything you can print.
[Elsewhere I describe a shotgun made out of scaffolding. http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4377441&cid=45235721 A garage-gimmick that's been around for decades, yet you don't hear police reporting murders by pipe-shotguns very often. Nor calling them "the next generation of firearms".]
The actual advantage of the 3d-printer is not that it makes it easier (it doesn't), it's that you end up with something that looks more like a gun, with the firing mechanism (catch, release, trigger and spring) neatly fitted inside the housing.
There is steel scaffolding pipe which is exactly the right inner-diameter to hold a standard 12-guage shotgun shell. It's also usually pre-threaded off-the-shelf.
So buy or cut a half a metre (a couple of feet) of unthreaded pipe that neatly holds a shotgun shell. That's your barrel. Then cut around 15cm (six inches) of a larger diameter pipe that slides over the first pipe, this should be threaded at one end. Get a standard end-cap that fits the larger diameter pipe. Drill a pilot hole in the centre of the end cap, screw in short screw, so a few milimetres (errr, not much of an inch) of the point is poking through the inside. Size the pilot hole so that the screw is in tightly, it's your firing pin.
Screw the end-cap on the larger pipe, also tightly. Load a shotgun shell in the small (long) pipe, put the larger pipe over the back, and pump it sharply against the shotgun shell to fire. (Like using a bike pump.) Pull the "pump handle" off, flick the spent shell out, load new one, repeat. If you want to get fancy, you can make up a stock, springs, catch and trigger, etc, to make it more "gun-like". While making it, use a spent shell cartridge to see if your firing-pin lines up and is the right length. And the first time you fire it, it's worth removing out the shot and test firing a blank cartridge. Look for cracking or warping between every shot.
Do not point directly at face. Do not fire at humans or pets. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. No responsibility is taken by FLM Co or its parent company for any damage or injury caused by...
Seriously, making zip-guns is dangerous, and typically illegal outside of the United States. The point is that it's easy, even without skills, and yet outside of hobbyists (and prisons), you don't see criminals using one-shot zip-guns for their crimes.
police confiscated what they claimed were "incendiary arrows" but were actually foam-tipped arrows used by LARPers
Meanwhile, the same police will call their own actual incendiary grenades "smoke grenades" which, oops, "may have accidentally caused a fire" (and burned the body of the shot suspect and most of the evidence re: the police shooting.)
And the media will go along with it. Which is the problem. Reporters trust police statements to be roughly factual, so police quickly learn they can get away with saying almost anything.
[Note the phrase the UK police are hammering in every release in TFA, "The next generation of firearms". (Which involves "technology being acquired by the organised crime groups, which they supply to criminal gangs, which are causing misery in our communities".)]
Also, if a plastic trigger is illegal, that would make every plastic toy gun, every water pistol, every cap gun, illegal. And every seller, maker, importer guilty of manufacturing/importing/distributing illegal firearm parts.
Nearly every cleaner, weed-spray, bug-spray bottle in my laundry has a trigger on it.
Also, I've seen SOHO Kyocera laser printers with a flat bed scanner under the document feeder. You won't need both types. [But stick to their proper network printers. There's a newer range for small offices, and many functions may not work properly over a network, only 1:1. Whether that means Kyocera is starting down the path of shitty consumer models, I don't know.]
If you print a lot of non-photo colour, pump for a colour laser. If you only print a bit of colour, occasionally but on demand, buy a cheap consumer inkjet or photo-printer every 3-12 months depending on use and plug it into a spare laptop, not the network. (I've had reasonable luck with entry-level ($50) Canon MFPs not drying out from lack of use. But cheap Epsons and HPs can't seem to handle not being used regularly.)
"Must last several years" is the wrong thinking with inkjets. Treat them as disposable, save yourself grief. If you get more than 12 months out of it, bonus. If not, who cares.
Any word you use relates to your own realty, which might be far from what is going in truth. Do I make myself clear enough?
No. Your word choice was poor. Had you said, "Any word you use relates to your own truth, which might be far from reality" it might have been more poetic. Your version just sounded like mindless po-mo wankery.
No, not really. "Reaches", "Tops", "Exceeds", but not "Peaks", not unless the program is now ending and this is the final tally (which it isn't and it's not.)
"I'll kill us all unless I get what I want." No. "Okay, I'll kill us all unless I get some of what I want." No. "But I compromised! You're not being fair!"
No, any compatible ICD "programmer" from a cardiac hospital would work. They use keys for handshaking, but at the manufacturer/model level, not the doctor/patient level.
Particularly when the assault would look to observers exactly like a heart attack, of a man who has heart disease. As opposed to looking like a bloody knife sticking out of his chest.
Slashdot Mirror
Two suppliers (one US and one Israeli) went out of production. The third and last is in Europe and the EU has a ban of exporting drugs for executions.
The real problem (again avoiding the whole capital punishment debate) is that the laws named the specific drugs to be used in lethal injections, without allowing for substitution. A single clause, "or a substitute approved by the office of the Governor" and none of this would be necessary.
Apparently the specific chemical is defined in the death penalty laws. You can't legally use a substitute.
The only solution is to change the law, but unless you have a solid block majority of every chamber, plus an unbeatable lead in the polls, chances are no politician wants to touch that.
The crazy thing is that the drugs used in lethal injection are about the worst, most Rube Goldberg way to "put someone down". A rare anaesthetic, then a muscle-relaxant, and then a chemical to explode the cells in the heart. If you get the levels of any chemical wrong (most commonly the anaesthetic) you subject the prisoner to the most painful experience any human can possibly have. The stuff vets use (Somulose) is a single injection, works every time. Simple, safer, and widely available.
And another thirty to vent the nitrogen [*] before sending in the doctor to confirm the death. Otherwise you'll have another death on your hands. Probably several, before someone realises what's going on.
Seriously, happens when farmers repair leaking metal water tanks. The newly exposed metal insta-rusts, using up the oxygen in the air in the tank, the farmer dies. His son or hand sees him collapse, thinks he's having a heart attack, jumps in and dies too. Happens in ships' ballasts too, for the same reason.
[* Well, reduce it to 78% anyway.]
You don't need to vent an entire room, just feed the nitrogen into a simple breathing mask, with a bellows to ensure they are getting the nitrogen only.
(Bottle of nitrogen, gas bubbler to warm and humidify the gas, bellows, plastic mask, plastic tubing. Dead in 30 seconds. Bam. Done.)
I'd have the judge execute the prisoner, but only after being required to spend 30 days with them. (Separated only as much as needed for security.) If the judge has second thoughts, he can reverse the jury's verdict, call for a new trial, or commute the sentence. This would serve in place of the entire appeals process.
If the judge still believes the prisoner is guilty, the prisoner is strapped down on a table and the judge stabs him through the heart with a long thin dagger. Quick, clean, ceremonial.
Worse case, it at least saves money. Best case, it summons Cthulhu.
Most firing squads are just regular soldiers or guards called up. They aren't paid executioners. In the case of soldiers, they might be firing upon a fellow soldier, wearing the same uniform, who just two or three days before was sharing the same trench.
Since these are essentially one-shot guns. If you are making your own ammunition, why not make a muzzle loader? Saves a lot of hassle making the ammunition. Powder, ball-bearing, wadding. Use an electric (piezo) ignition instead of a match or flint-strike.
Is there really a risk of "organised crime groups" making plastic guns?
The "Liberator" 3d zip-gun can fire one shot at a time. It's smooth bore [*], limiting it's accuracy and hence range. Even when made by a high-end sintered powder commercial 3d printer, they tend to fail quickly when firing full-power rounds (so are usually tested with low-powered cartridges.) After a few rounds, the barrel melts and deforms enough to crack, and if you keep firing, it will eventually fail completely. Depending on how it fails, it may blow your hand off.
To reload it, you have to unscrew the barrel, poke out the spent cartridge with a rod (it will jam in the barrel due to the melted plastic), then put in a new cartridge, screw the barrel back in the gun-body, cock the firing pin, and then you're ready to fire. In a video some months back, it took about 20 seconds per round, during which time you would be, in effect, unarmed. That means, of course, that in reality you have only one shot.
[* One experimenter found that his version kept failing, so he put "rifling" in it and it worked. But I suspect all he did was make vents that bled off part of the gas, reducing the pressure enough to prevent immediate barrel failure. That, of course, will cut the range/power dramatically. It may have also loosened the firing path for the slug, preventing jamming in the barrel. Basically he made it sloppier so it wouldn't explode.]
You can use much simpler tools to make a one-shot, smooth-bore, take-apart-to-reload, zip-gun like the 3d-printed guns, starting with off-the-shelf parts and very limited tools and experience. A zip-gun just need a barrel (pipe), a firing chamber (thicker walled pipe), a firing pin (nail on a spring). Buy pre-threaded pipe and you don't even need welding experience.
Hell, you can probably make one out of plastic without too much difficulty. I suspect you can buy higher grade plastic tubing that is stronger and more heat-tolerant than anything you can print.
[Elsewhere I describe a shotgun made out of scaffolding. http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4377441&cid=45235721 A garage-gimmick that's been around for decades, yet you don't hear police reporting murders by pipe-shotguns very often. Nor calling them "the next generation of firearms".]
The actual advantage of the 3d-printer is not that it makes it easier (it doesn't), it's that you end up with something that looks more like a gun, with the firing mechanism (catch, release, trigger and spring) neatly fitted inside the housing.
There is steel scaffolding pipe which is exactly the right inner-diameter to hold a standard 12-guage shotgun shell. It's also usually pre-threaded off-the-shelf.
So buy or cut a half a metre (a couple of feet) of unthreaded pipe that neatly holds a shotgun shell. That's your barrel. Then cut around 15cm (six inches) of a larger diameter pipe that slides over the first pipe, this should be threaded at one end. Get a standard end-cap that fits the larger diameter pipe. Drill a pilot hole in the centre of the end cap, screw in short screw, so a few milimetres (errr, not much of an inch) of the point is poking through the inside. Size the pilot hole so that the screw is in tightly, it's your firing pin.
Screw the end-cap on the larger pipe, also tightly. Load a shotgun shell in the small (long) pipe, put the larger pipe over the back, and pump it sharply against the shotgun shell to fire. (Like using a bike pump.) Pull the "pump handle" off, flick the spent shell out, load new one, repeat. If you want to get fancy, you can make up a stock, springs, catch and trigger, etc, to make it more "gun-like". While making it, use a spent shell cartridge to see if your firing-pin lines up and is the right length. And the first time you fire it, it's worth removing out the shot and test firing a blank cartridge. Look for cracking or warping between every shot.
Do not point directly at face. Do not fire at humans or pets. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. No responsibility is taken by FLM Co or its parent company for any damage or injury caused by...
Seriously, making zip-guns is dangerous, and typically illegal outside of the United States. The point is that it's easy, even without skills, and yet outside of hobbyists (and prisons), you don't see criminals using one-shot zip-guns for their crimes.
Meanwhile, the same police will call their own actual incendiary grenades "smoke grenades" which, oops, "may have accidentally caused a fire" (and burned the body of the shot suspect and most of the evidence re: the police shooting.)
And the media will go along with it. Which is the problem. Reporters trust police statements to be roughly factual, so police quickly learn they can get away with saying almost anything.
[Note the phrase the UK police are hammering in every release in TFA, "The next generation of firearms". (Which involves "technology being acquired by the organised crime groups, which they supply to criminal gangs, which are causing misery in our communities".)]
Also, if a plastic trigger is illegal, that would make every plastic toy gun, every water pistol, every cap gun, illegal. And every seller, maker, importer guilty of manufacturing/importing/distributing illegal firearm parts.
Nearly every cleaner, weed-spray, bug-spray bottle in my laundry has a trigger on it.
That doesn't work. It we "halted" time then there'd be no delay. The article and every comment on it would appear simultaneously.
Wildly overkill for SOHO when the submitter is talking about the level of inkjets.
That is a little bit harsh
Actually it's Wikipedia's own policy. Wikipedia is not and should never be considered a source (it's a destination.)
AFAIK, there is no laser printer which will do this.
That's because the fuser (heater) will kill the disc.
3rd party ink is cheap enough that I'm not too worried about cost.
Have you tried continuous feed ink systems?
Also, I've seen SOHO Kyocera laser printers with a flat bed scanner under the document feeder. You won't need both types. [But stick to their proper network printers. There's a newer range for small offices, and many functions may not work properly over a network, only 1:1. Whether that means Kyocera is starting down the path of shitty consumer models, I don't know.]
If you print a lot of non-photo colour, pump for a colour laser. If you only print a bit of colour, occasionally but on demand, buy a cheap consumer inkjet or photo-printer every 3-12 months depending on use and plug it into a spare laptop, not the network. (I've had reasonable luck with entry-level ($50) Canon MFPs not drying out from lack of use. But cheap Epsons and HPs can't seem to handle not being used regularly.)
"Must last several years" is the wrong thinking with inkjets. Treat them as disposable, save yourself grief. If you get more than 12 months out of it, bonus. If not, who cares.
Any word you use relates to your own realty, which might be far from what is going in truth. Do I make myself clear enough?
No. Your word choice was poor. Had you said, "Any word you use relates to your own truth, which might be far from reality" it might have been more poetic. Your version just sounded like mindless po-mo wankery.
No, not really. "Reaches", "Tops", "Exceeds", but not "Peaks", not unless the program is now ending and this is the final tally (which it isn't and it's not.)
"I'll kill us all unless I get what I want."
No.
"Okay, I'll kill us all unless I get some of what I want."
No.
"But I compromised! You're not being fair!"
No, any compatible ICD "programmer" from a cardiac hospital would work. They use keys for handshaking, but at the manufacturer/model level, not the doctor/patient level.
Particularly when the assault would look to observers exactly like a heart attack, of a man who has heart disease. As opposed to looking like a bloody knife sticking out of his chest.
and require them
Errr, if they are independent countries, you ain't "requiring" shit.
NSA's budget is $10b. Less than NASA's $17b.
Supposedly, the unpublished "black budget", for NSA/CIA/etc combined, is around $50b. But that's still only 1.5% of the Federal budget.