“Through the efforts of anti-death penalty activists, it’s becoming harder to get the drugs necessary for lethal injection,” Wyoming State Senator Bruce Burns (R-Sheridan) tells National Review Online of a Friday decision to propose firing-squad executions in the Equality State. “The secondary form of execution is the gas chamber. The problem Wyoming has there is we don’t have one. So without the drugs we don’t have any form of execution.”

Burns serves on the state’s interim Joint Judiciary Committee, which considered solutions to the problems lethal-injection state executions are facing all over the country. The committee last week rejected a proposal to ban the death penalty and submitted a proposal that would make Wyoming the third state (along with Utah and Oklahoma) to authorize its department of corrections to use firing squads for executions.

“The committee looked at various means of execution,” Burns tells NRO. “Other than lethal injection and gas chamber, the other standard means are the electric chair, hanging and firing squad. Firing squad seemed like the most efficient. It’s also usually the most thorough. One of the legislators [Republican State Representative Stephen Watt] asked what if they all miss? But there is less likelihood of all the members of a firing squad missing than there is of the kind of problems we’ve seen with other means.”

An April execution by lethal injection in Oklahoma was “botched” in the sense that condemned prisoner Clayton Lockett’s death throes were energetic and lengthy enough to make the grim reality of killing clear to onlookers. That incident provoked a wave of revulsion toward capital punishment, though the death penalty remains popular throughout the United States. In the aftermath of the Lockett execution, some observers, instead of ruling out the death penalty, have begun to question whether state governments’ preference for more humanitarian-seeming methods is in fact any less harsh than more traditional forms of state-sponsored killing.

“I tried to put myself in that position,” Burns notes. “How would I want to be executed?” The firing squad has actually been a requested means of execution for such prominent prisoners as Major John André, the British officer who facilitated Benedict Arnold’s defection during the Revolutionary War, and who reportedly remarked after learning that he would instead be hanged, “I am reconciled to my death, but I detest the mode.”

The full Wyoming state house will vote on the proposal in January.