Gunsmoke and Blood: The Last Firing Squad Execution in America
The American execution chamber is a theater of contradictions—clinical yet medieval, bureaucratic yet barbaric, a place where the state tiptoes around the grotesquery of snuffing out a human life while ensuring every last drop of dignity has been wrung out before the body hits the slab. And in this grand chamber of absurdities, where men are chemically suffocated under the pretense of "humane punishment," one man stood up, sneered at the hypocrisy, and chose the bullet over the needle.
His name was Ronnie Lee Gardner, and on June 18, 2010, he sat strapped to a chair in a Utah prison, waiting to be perforated by five government-issued lead injections, making him the last man in America to be executed by firing squad.
THE OUTLAW’S CHOICE
To be clear, no one should be misty-eyed about Gardner. He was a lifelong criminal who racked up a violent rap sheet that crescendoed with the 1985 murder of attorney Michael Burdell—a man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when Gardner, in a botched courtroom escape attempt, turned a routine hearing into a Wild West shootout. His fate was never in doubt. The state would kill him. The only question was how.
By the time his number came up, Utah had mostly phased out the firing squad in favor of lethal injection—a process that sounds sterile and surgical, like something a veterinarian would administer to a sick golden retriever. But Gardner, in one final act of defiance, invoked a grandfather clause that allowed him to select his method of execution. He went Old Testament, opting for the visceral, unambiguous certainty of the firing squad.
It was the ultimate nihilistic mic drop: a man condemned to die, stripping the state of its illusion of civility and forcing it to play executioner in the most graphic way possible. No syringes, no slow suffocation under a botched chemical cocktail—just bullets, blood, and gravity doing what it does.
THEATER OF THE MACABRE
In the predawn hours of June 18, 2010, Gardner was wheeled into an execution chamber that looked like a high school gymnasium—if high school gymnasiums had bulletproof walls and sandbags to soak up the arterial spray. A target was pinned over his heart. Five anonymous riflemen—four loaded with live rounds, one with a blank—lined up 25 feet away, shouldered their weapons, and squeezed the triggers in synchronized unison.
Bang.
A brutal, cinematic, and completely unambiguous death. No malfunctioning drugs, no agonized twitching, no whispered apologies from anonymous doctors. Just a man with a black hood over his head and a gaping hole where his heart used to be.
It was a scene ripped straight from an 1800s frontier justice manual, but this was 2010—a time of iPhones, drone warfare, and space tourism. America is a country that pretends to be forward-thinking, but every now and then, the mask slips, and you see the animal underneath.
THE DEATH PENALTY’S NOSTALGIA PROBLEM
There is something uniquely American about executing someone in a way that feels like it should be reserved for traitors in wartime. The firing squad conjures images of desperadoes in the desert, cigarette clenched between their teeth, staring down their executioners with the stoicism of men who know the game is over. And yet, here we are—over a decade later, and the firing squad is not a dusty relic of frontier justice but an active option in the United States.
Utah brought it back in 2015 as a backup for when the preferred method of execution—lethal injection—becomes an embarrassing logistical nightmare. Idaho followed suit in 2023. The issue? Pharmaceutical companies, in a moment of unexpected moral clarity, have started refusing to sell the drugs needed for lethal injections, forcing states into increasingly desperate measures. Some have resorted to experimental cocktails, turning condemned inmates into unwilling lab rats. Others have dabbled with nitrogen gas, an untested horror-show solution that sounds more like a Bond villain’s fantasy than a real-world plan.
And then there’s the firing squad: cheap, effective, and brutally honest. The state points, the rifles bark, and the problem is solved. No margin for error. No appeals for a do-over. Just physics and death.
THE FINAL IRONY
For Gardner, choosing the firing squad wasn’t just about expedience. It was a final act of agency. He spent his life under the thumb of the system—abused as a child, bounced between institutions, hardened into something that no rehabilitation program could reach. His death was inevitable, but by choosing the gun over the needle, he at least controlled the optics. He forced the public to confront the reality of what capital punishment really is: the cold, unflinching destruction of a life, carried out with bureaucratic precision but no pretense of mercy.
For most condemned prisoners, execution is a grim inevitability—something done to them. But Gardner flipped the script. He made the state pull the trigger.
And somewhere, deep in the collective American subconscious, we’re still squirming about it.