Capital Punishment: A Public or Private Matter?

Here in the United States, a predominately "Christian" country, the topic of capital punishment, i.e the death penalty, is almost always a hot topic within society. Is it "morally correct" to end someone's life? You have those of the opinion that it is simply wrong to execute someone, while others voice that there are those that deserve to die. This is an important issue to address because it is quite literally a life and death situation.

I am not going to write an article debating the legitimacy, or illegitimacy, of the death penalty; but rather a side of it that we as a society should consider. Should the public be subjected to actually witnessing the execution of a convicted criminal? Now please don't scream that I am a sadistic bastard that simply wants to see more violence on my television set, I simply come from the view that if you are going to be behind killing someone, you ought to have to face up (literally) to your actions.

In our country, we have the raciest, most violent, and most vulgar superstructure of any country, yet we aren't willing to show the execution of someone that is being killed willingly by the majority of the country, but yet we don't want to watch it. When Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the Oklahoma City Bombing, was executed in June of 2001, the people of the United States were treated to relentless coverage of every aspect of the execution, except the execution itself, all the way up until Mr. McVeigh was taken into the execution room.

Perhaps, we as a nation, should take more responsibility for ending someone's life. I am not going to argue whether or not Timothy McVeigh should or should not have been executed, but we simply accept the death penalty as being legal, and simply pay no heed to it afterward.

The question that we must ask ourselves is this; if you were in the room, could you be the one to inject Mr. McVeigh, or perhaps the one that actually hanged Saddam Hussein (which was shown on Al-Jazeira TV), could you physically do it? If your answer is yes, as I'm sure its easier for those affected by Hussein's tyrannical rule, or by McVeigh''s bombing, then alright, I suppose I don't have much argument with you. But if your answer is no, which I'm thinking is the majority of you, then we really must ask ourselves if we really believe this is alright to do without us even having to see it, or maybe even alright to do at all. Are we simply passing the buck on to someone else, in this case the government, to do what we ourselves could not? If so, then we have some issues to resolve before we continue on executing people in our country.