From some war movies and TV dramas, you will usually see scenes such as shooting criminals, where the shooter stands in a row facing the executed person and obeys the instructions, raises the gun at the same time, and then shoots at the same time. Shooting, commonly known as shooting, has been a common method of execution in military and war since the 18th century.
In order to maintain the order of the army and thus ensure the combat effectiveness of the army, shooting is the highest punishment and the most deterrent way to face crimes such as desertion, murder, espionage, mutiny or treason! To this day, shootings remain the most common method of execution for military personnel in the world today, and are used in more than 70 countries. Perhaps as long as there is war, this ancient way of executing will continue to exist.
The format of the execution should be familiar to everyone, the prisoners either stand against the wall or kneel on the ground, and behind them is a row of executioners who simultaneously raise their guns and shoot the prisoners. The whole process seems very simple, but it is not so simple, the firing squad is generally 6 to 12 people, but the number of people who were shot in front of them is not so many, and most of the time it is a firing squad that shoots one person, why so many people? And you want to shoot at the same time? Is it because of the fear that a shot will not hit or that a shot will not kill at all?
Obviously not so, such a close distance to the specialized firing squad marksmanship will not be unable to shoot a deadly shot. The real reason is because it is necessary to take into account the psychological problems of the executioner! The execution team itself is a life-ending character, but the soldiers of the execution team are also flesh and blood people, not emotionless killing machines. Although the prisoner committed a capital crime, in the depths of many soldiers, it is inevitable that taking a living life is an immoral act, and if it is clearly known that the life of the person in front of them ends in their own hands, the guilt in the executioner's heart will be even heavier.
During the execution, there will even be many soldiers who will subconsciously miss the fatal chest area because they do not want to be the one who ends the life of others. When shooting, someone will deliberately shoot the limbs because they know that the person will die anyway, but do not want it to be because of themselves.
So usually when the shooting is carried out, the person being shot is facing an entire firing squad, theoretically, a firing squad is enough to kill the prisoner, usually after the execution they do not know which person or several people shot the fatal shot, in this case, the soldier's guilt will be lower.
Of course, even a death squad execution can have accidents, and there is a real example in World War II, where an American soldier was shot twice by the firing squad, because all the soldiers avoided his key point during the first salvo, and he had to be shot again.
The purpose of the execution is to ensure that the prisoner will die quickly, and if there are fewer participants, the greater the mental impact on the executioner, just as more people can be bold by doing "bad things" together!
Of course, many executioners in war also take another way to alleviate the guilt of the executing soldiers, that is, to use empty packages. Some of the bullets sent to the firing squad in advance were empty packages and some were live ammunition, but they did not know whether the bullets they got were live ammunition. Through this arrangement, no one will know who fired the fatal shot, so that the team members can psychologically alleviate their sense of guilt.
At best, they could only know that the man in front of them had not been killed by himself, and according to a British Army soldier who had participated in World War I, he remembered many years after a shooting in 1915, recalling: "As soon as the shot was fired, I found that there was no recoil, and I was glad to know that I only fired an empty bullet." ”
In addition, most of the executed prisoners will be blocked on the head with a black cloth or something else, which is actually to reduce the pressure of the execution soldiers, according to relevant information, when the executed person can look into the eyes of the executioner, it will cause most of the executioners to have great psychological pressure.
People are not grass and trees, who can be ruthless! Even in the face of a person whose sin has reached the point of death, when the right person wants to act as an executioner and take the lives of others, the pressure must be not small. So, you might argue that executing a shooting is not just the fear of the executed, the executor is also dominated by fear!
This fear will only be eliminated if war disappears and crime does not exist; otherwise, as long as war and crime persist, the deterrent power of this fear will be needed, and fear will live forever!