SOUTH CAROLINA added firing squads to the state’s execution methods on Wednesday in response to difficulties in obtaining drugs for lethal injections.

The Republican-dominated state is keen to resume putting people to death after a 10-year hiatus, partly as a challenge to anti-death penalty US President Joe Biden.

The state ran out of stocks of the three drugs prescribed for executions – pentobarbital, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride – in 2013, and has failed to replenish them, as drug manufacturers have become reluctant to provide them for US states which apply the death penalty. Death row inmates choose whether to die by lethal injection or electric chair, so the lack of drugs has delayed many executions. The new law requires the condemned to pick between death by firing squad and the electric chair if lethal injection drugs aren’t available.

With several inmates awaiting execution, Democrat Justin Bamberg warned his fellow legislators that they should think of the “living, breathing human beings with a heartbeat that this Bill is aimed at killing … you may as well be throwing the switch yourself.”