A plan to publicly livestream the firing-squad execution of Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan is drawing a warning that it would coarsen Americans, not deter crime.

• The war secretary announced Hasan will be shot by a soldier firing squad at Fort Hood, with the killing made public to watch.
• Public executions were banned a century ago in the US and Europe because of what the spectacle does to the crowd, not to the condemned.
• Hasan is a paraplegic in a wheelchair, and Trump may shut the plan down over how it would look.
• The broader charge: both parties have stopped treating every human life as equal — from Iranian schoolgirls killed in a bombing to late-term abortion to Ukrainian casualties counted as useful drone-war data.
• Charlie Kirk, before his death, opposed the death penalty on the grounds that any killing power a government gets will eventually be turned on its own critics.

Outlook: The execution plan may be quietly dropped, but the appetite for public violence it revealed is unlikely to fade.