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 Sol Invictus wrote:
I agree that a noose is automatically a racist symbol so take that for what it's worth.

No one has said it does, but that doesn't mean that it can't have that connotation based on context. Or to put it another way just being a noose doesn't automatically make it not a racist symbol either: context is important.

You apparently have no idea what 'my worldview' is so it seems an odd choice of statement to go after unless trying to win some false internet points.

When did the USA give up hanging as a standard method of death sentence and substitute shooting/electric chair/guillotine/drugs?

 Kilkrazy wrote:
When did the USA give up hanging as a standard method of death sentence and substitute shooting/electric chair/guillotine/drugs?

Just dropping in to answer your question.



Lethal injection is the default method of capital punishment in all fifty United States. Other methods are used in twelve States, but only if the person under a death warrant requests it. However, after an alternate choice is made, the condemned cannot challenge the constitutionality of it in court.


As of 2016, only Delaware and Washington (State) offer the option of hanging as a means of execution. The last time somebody on death row being executed in this manner (upon request) was in Delaware, back in 1996.


The guillotine isn't among the methods currently used. Nor was it ever a standard method of execution anywhere in the United States.

Do any still allow firing squad?

 Ahtman wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
Well, I figured, as a public forum, I'd be okay to throw in the opinion of someone who is from a different culture explaining why someone might be unaware of a cultural perception seen in a certain country. Apparently, I can't even say that unless I'm part of that culture. /shrug

The problem isn't having an opinion, and no one has said you can't have one either, but the way it was presented it, starting with the caveat that you knew it didn't really apply.

I actually said I wasn't sure if it was relevant. You did quote it.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
I've never associated racism with hanging

That is nice and is easy to say but doesn't change the reality that in the USA, where it happened, that lynching (not hanging) is associated with oppression and bigotry.

See, this might have been the issue:
I associate 'lynching' with racism, and what you described.
I associate 'hanging' with a fairly normal means of execution in history.
I associate nooses foremost with hanging - not lynching.

If I can't associate nooses with lynching first, how can I immediately jump to that conclusion it's a byword for racism?
This may have been the case with the man in the OP - but hey, I can't provide any evidence for that. Not to mention the fact this did happen in the US, he probably should have known about the cultural implications of it.

 MrDwhitey wrote:
Do any still allow firing squad?

According to Wikepedia, Utah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States#Methods

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
I actually said I wasn't sure if it was relevant. You did quote it.

Right, you knew it probably wasn't relevant or fit yet still went ahead with it. If you can't see how that is funny I can't help you.

If I can't associate nooses with lynching first, how can I immediately jump to that conclusion it's a byword for racism?

By doing what we have been saying and looking at context. No one has said that nooses automatically mean racism, though bizarrely some keep arguing against a non-made point, but that a guy hanging nooses from a tree with a sign making references to sundown towns and extra judicial killings absolutely is questionable. This didn't happen in a vacuum, after all, but within a culture and place where this isn't exactly an outlier.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
When did the USA give up hanging as a standard method of death sentence and substitute shooting/electric chair/guillotine/drugs?

It started to fall out of style at the turn of the 20th century, because hangings increasingly came to be seen as inhumane. While the the typical practice was that a sudden drop and stop would snap the neck of the condemned, it's not really that simple. Body weight and environmental conditions can all have a huge effect on how long/tight the noose and rope need to be to snap the neck. Turns out there wasn't an abundance of people well versed in physics who were up for calculating primo noose tying. Many people condemened to be hanged didn't die of a broken neck. The noose often failed and the victim asphyxiated (as I said on page one, this is a long painful and agonizing way to die). EDIT: Alternatively, some were decapitated, which was taken as overly brutal.

Hanging began to be widely replaced with the electric chair in the 20th century, which was at the time seen as much more humane. I think some states still have hanging on the books, but they don't use it often.

 CptJake wrote:
I don't know of any law stating you must give a warning before firing. You do have to perceive a threat, but many castle doctrine laws allow that someone breaking into your house is a threat.

 trexmeyer wrote:

Col. Dash wrote:When did nooses become a racist thing?

Somewhere around 100 years ago. Is history taught in school anymore?

So the gallows that I have for my Wild West games is an indicator of racism? I wonder if 4Ground and the other companies that make them are aware of this.

All the film makers making Westerns where folks get hanged must be racists too.

No because a gallows is not a noose hanging from a tree. A gallows might be horrific, but it isn't typically associated with being the site of a lynching. It would be a racist symbol if you took that exact same rope & knot and moved them from human made structure to a tree limb. If it's made of timbers and nails it's merely a gross symbol of human callousness and bloodlust, rather a symbol of that and oppression and racial hatred.


Regardless I buy exactly zero excuses or ideas that this guy was just an idiot or fool who didn't understand the the symbolism. It was, he was making a statement on race, simply forgot his world views aren't considered tasteful in public in this day and age.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I doubt there's "a bunch" of people slavering at the though of killing someone who stepped onto their lawn.

It is widely believed that people are justified in using deadly force to protect their property. Signs that say something along the lines of 'tresspassers will be shot' are mass produced. Whether that's sensible or completely fething bonkers is a whole other debate, but even if a person thinks there is a right to use deadly force to protect property, it is impossible to deny the existence of people who go beyond that, and treat shooting a home invader as a kind of daydream fantasy. Whether there is enough such people to qualify as 'a bunch' is an impossible argument, because 'a bunch' is not a defined number.

But given the instances of shootings, and the long series of movies about inflicting extra-judicial violence on criminals, it's pretty hard to deny these people don't exist in reasonable numbers.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I specifically said ...."I doubt there's "a bunch" of people slavering at the though of killing someone who stepped onto their lawn." and ...."no one who actually wants to kill people is going to put nooses up around their yard."

Making the threat is taking baby steps in to living out the fantasy. Sure, a person who wanted to kill people would be irrational for talking about that intent before they did it. But they still do it because, incredibly, people who fantasize about committing violence aren't particularly rational people.

 d-usa wrote:
Well, some native american tribes here in Oklahoma used the swastika on their basketball uniforms, and the 45th Infantry Division used the swastika as their symbol 80 years ago. So clearly Native Americans and parts of the army were nazis.

Or we can pretend that context matters and just as the swastika had a different meaning prior to WW2, and still has a different meaning with some populations today, a noose in the form of a gallows or in the broader context of a state-sanctioned judicially administered death penalty has a different meaning than a noose hanging from a tree with the threat of an extrajudicial resolution in a state with a known history of lynchings.

I'm not going to lie. This is the only thing I think I could ever agree on with you. Context is important. In India a swastika has a meaning much different than the one the Nazis perpetuated. Also the direction its going matters, so its easy to tell which is religiously symbolic, and which is not.

Lynchings happened on the spot in what ever means were available to them, most commonly trees. Were used illegally to murder other human beings illegally and horribly based on ignorant criteria.
Gallows were used to execute in a slightly more humane manner criminals found guilty of capitol punishment.

All in all, I think this was probably a very real attempt to scare off people from his law, using what is known to be racially biased imagry, most likely in the thought that the people that stole his trailer were most likely black. However if I were black, and stole his trailer, I would probably come back just because of the nooses and see if he had the courage of his convictions.