IN 1996 the state of Utah put John Albert Taylor, a man who had raped and murdered an 11-year-old girl, to death by firing squad. Chris Zimmerman, a retired police officer who investigated the murder, witnessed the execution. “Off to our left was Mr Taylor, off to the right, behind a wall, was the firing squad,” he remembers. “There was a countdown, and the firing squad were ordered to aim and fire. I heard a simultaneous explosion—you couldn’t tell the guns apart. He clenched his fists, his chest rose a little, like it was suddenly filled with gas. Then he unclenched his fists, the doctor walked out with a stethoscope and checked his pulse, and it was over.” Since 1976, when capital punishment was brought back in the United States, only three people have been executed by firing squad in America—all in Utah. The state banned the method in 2004 (though since the law did not apply to past cases, another man was shot in 2010). But on March 10th its legislature passed a law to bring back the guns. Utah is one of several states trying to ensure it can kill people if lethal injection, the preferred modern way, is not available. To the relief of abolitionists, not many are succeeding.

Lethal injection has been becoming more controversial, and trickier, since 2011, when the European Commission banned the sale of eight drugs if the purpose was to use them in executions. Many manufacturers, including American ones, fearing bad publicity as well as regulatory problems, stopped making or supplying drugs too. The result has been an acute shortage of the chemicals with which it is legally possible to execute people in most of the 32 states that still have the death penalty. Last year 35 people were executed in America (see chart), the fewest since 1994.

Several states have tried to acquire drugs in other ways—typically from crude “compounding pharmacies”. But since this has not always worked, they must find alternatives. In Oklahoma, where a botched lethal injection took 43 awful minutes to kill a prisoner last year, the state House on March 3rd overwhelmingly approved a bill to allow the state to execute people by gassing them with nitrogen. On March 12th the Alabama House voted to reintroduce the electric chair. In Wyoming, the state House has passed a bill to bring back firing squads. Several states now also keep the names of their lethal-drug-suppliers secret, to protect them from protests.

So far, however, few alternatives have passed into law. Several states retain the option of the electric chair, and a few the use of hanging, but such executions are now extremely rare, and almost only because the prisoner requests it (the last man to die by the electric chair was in Virginia in 2013). Wyoming’s bill on firing squads was held up by a debate about whether prisoners should be sedated, and ultimately failed; Utah’s barely made it to a vote, and may yet be vetoed by the governor. Only in Tennessee has a law reintroducing the electric chair made it on to the books.