The firing squad clock: a 5.4 ms bullet, 13 ms of sound, the chest-shot catch
If a firing squad is standing fifteen feet away, the supersonic bullet will strike the body in about five point four milliseconds. The sound of the gunshot takes thirteen point three milliseconds to reach your ear. So you're physically hit before you even hear it. Right. Hey, I'm Grace.
I'm Salt. And today we're looking at the physics and the neurobiology of a firing squad. Because the math of it promises this instant, painless end, but the medical reality says something very different. Okay, Grace, walk me through that math. How does the timing break down at that distance?
The standard execution distance in the U. S. is, uh, it's just fifteen feet. At that range, if you fire a point-three-zero caliber rifle bullet traveling at eight hundred and fifty meters per second, it crosses the gap in five point four milliseconds. Wow.
Yeah. It's incredibly fast. And human nerve signals just aren't built to compete with that. A rapid pain signal takes roughly a hundred milliseconds to travel up a one-meter nerve pathway from, say, your chest to your spinal cord and up to the brain. So the bullet destroys the tissue in under six milliseconds, and the pain signal hasn't even, um, it hasn't even started to make the trip.
That's the idea. And even once that signal arrives, human consciousness doesn't—doesn't work in real time. Neuroscience researchers note that we process reality in these unconscious time slices that last up to four hundred milliseconds. Time slices? Like frames in a movie?
Kind of. The brain collects sensory input, processes it, and then feeds you the finished picture. Full conscious awareness of an experience takes maybe five hundred to six hundred milliseconds to register. Huh. So if you put the physics next to the neurobiology, the tissue is gone long before the brain can assemble the moment.
Based on the pure speed of the ballistics, it should be lights out before you feel a single thing. Okay, so what's the catch? Why did you say the medical reality is different? Because of where they aim. A firing squad doesn't shoot for the head.
They target the chest. Wait—what? I guess I just assumed they aimed for the brain, to make it instant. Why would they go for the chest? It's mostly about the target size.
The heart is a much bigger mark, and I guess from a practical standpoint, it's less visually destructive for the witnesses. But prioritizing the heart fundamentally changes the medical timeline. The South Carolina Supreme Court had to address this on July thirty-first, 2024, in a case called Owens v. Stirling. How did the court handle it?
Did they recognize that gap? They did. The court formally acknowledged that a targeted chest shot doesn't destroy the brain. It just stops the heart from pumping blood. So the inmate is likely to feel excruciating pain for ten to fifteen seconds before the brain finally runs out of oxygen and they lose consciousness.
Ten to fifteen seconds? That's—that's an eternity. When we were just talking about fractions of a millisecond. It gets worse. Because that fifteen-second timeline assumes a perfect strike that—well, one that instantly stops the heart.
And we know from the April eleventh, 2025 execution of Mikal Mahdi that perfection is rare. Right, I remember seeing headlines about that last year. What happened with his execution? According to the forensic evidence from the Marshall Project, the squad missed his heart. The bullets hit other tissue instead, and the autopsy showed his heart was relatively intact.
Witnesses reported that Mahdi was conscious, groaning and gasping for air for about eighty seconds. You're kidding. I wish I were. Eighty seconds is a huge window when we're talking about brain processing speed. The pain signals take a hundred milliseconds to reach the brain, and full awareness takes maybe six hundred.
So after that first second, the brain has fully caught up. It's processing everything. Right, the initial impact outruns the nervous system, sure, but because the brain itself is left intact and awake while the body bleeds out, you know, all that processing speed just guarantees the person is fully present for their own cardiorespiratory collapse. It's a grim picture. It really is.
So the whole argument that it's this instantaneous, humane method is just resting on a misunderstanding of anatomy. You can shoot a bullet at supersonic speeds, but you're still waiting for the brain to slowly suffocate. We're left wondering if the physical speed of ballistics can ever truly outrun the agonizing timeline of human cardiorespiratory collapse. Thanks a lot for listening to Daybrain.
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