444,
For centuries, people western cultures were simply taught that killing a man "in cold blood" was wrong, morally "dirty," or someting to be ashamed of. Remember how in the days of beheadings in England, it was customary for the condemned to tell the (masked) executioner, "I forgive you" ?
that begs the question of why they volunteered for the firing squad in the first place if they had such a moral aversion to it ?
Some of the background is from historic military procedure. I'm talking about folklore, and I don't have any specific references, but I expect that there have been times when people were assigned to firing squads, rather than volunteering for them.
Rifles being loaded out of sight of the riflemen, one loaded with a blank round, gave any members of the firing squad with moral or religiously-inspired misgivings a psychological way out of a sense of guilt for killing. That the condemned was getting the proper, prescribed punishment was not necessarily enough to overcome non-rational beliefs, especially for people who might not have had an advanced education in theology, philosophy, whatever. In times when one did as he was ordered, and in situations where it was seen as unmanly to admit less than enthusiasm for killing somebody, it created a private escape from the mental habits that went with having a good conscience. Instead of trying to find out soldiers' deep religious convictions and change (wrong) or make allowances for them, the blank round was a simple way to provide a grain of doubt in each man's mind that he had killed somebody that had been tied up in front of him.
I'm not talking about rational knowledge and rightness; it seems that the blank round was a way to allay the deep-seated, visceral sense of "the creeps" that might have had members of firing squads replaying the scene over and over in their minds, and developing a sense of personal guilt for their morally-correct actions.
