Utah, you have done this 3 times. Now help us stop it.

Utah, you have done this three times since 1977.

Gary Gilmore. John Albert Taylor. Ronnie Lee Gardner. Five rifles. A chair. A hood. A white target pinned over the heart. Sandbags stacked behind the chair so the bullets would not ricochet off the cinderblock. For 48 years, every firing squad execution in America was yours.

You know what the rifle does because you let reporters watch. When you shot Gardner in 2010, his arm jerked back with the impact. His fist clenched. It let go. It clenched again. His hand kept moving for two minutes. Some of the witnesses wondered whether you would have to shoot him again. Blood gathered in his lap. When the reporters toured the room, it smelled of bleach. Four bullet holes sat in the paneling behind the chair, all within four inches. Your medical examiner photographed the body. His brother Randy keeps those photographs in a manila envelope.

You have not fired since. Taberon Honie died by pentobarbital in 2024. In 2004, you stopped letting new prisoners choose the rifle. In 2015, you wrote it back into law for the day the drugs run out. Last year, you signed a warrant to shoot Ralph Menzies, a man with dementia. Your own Supreme Court stopped it. He died last November. You could have closed the door.

The country walked through the door you left open. South Carolina shot three men in 2025. Idaho made the rifle its first choice. Indiana tried to adopt the firing squad earlier this year. On Dec. 3, at Fort Hood, the military plans to shoot Nidal Hasan: the first military firing squad since the second World War. President Donald Trump approved it. Hasan is paralyzed. He uses a wheelchair. Seven weeks from now, the military intends to shoot a man who cannot even stand up.

I do not write this to shame you. I write because you are the one state that already knows the cost of the bullet. Every execution comes wrapped in four promises: certainty, humanity, honesty and free choice. Other states believe them. You found out with your own rifles.

Certainty. You never trusted one gun. You needed five. Five gave you two minutes of a moving hand. In South Carolina last year, Mikal Mahdi’s lawyers said the bullets missed his heart. A state can write a protocol. It cannot make a body obey a bullet.

Humanity. You built the chair. You built the wall with the gunport. You know what the bleach is for. Your own Legislature took the choice off the table in 2004. Something in you has always known that there is nothing humane about shooting someone.

Honesty. You load one of the five rifles with a blank so no officer has to know he fired the shot. That blank is a confession. You knew the weight was too much for one man to carry. Washington is learning the same thing.

Free choice. Gilmore chose the rifle. Taylor chose it. Gardner chose it. Menzies chose it. The choice was never theirs. Horrific choices always birth a horrific choice.

Here is what I believe. A state has a conscience. Yours has been stirring since 2004. When you shot Gardner, the family of the man he killed, Michael Burdell, asked you not to. They said he would not have wanted it. Religious leaders from across your faiths said the same. In 2016, a Republican senator who once supported executions carried a repeal bill through your Senate. In 2018, another tried. Something is stirring within you.

Now, it is your turn to lead. You were the first state to kill after the U.S. Supreme Court let the killing resume. Be the state that ends it. Repeal the firing squad before another state joins the symphony of gunshots. Say to Idaho, to Indiana, to the military, to the president: We tried this. We have the pictures. We know that nothing was gained. Put the gun down.

Do not wait for another body. Do not wait for Nidal Hasan to be obliterated on Dec. 3. Lead us out of this moral insanity. The nation needs your help to put down the gun.