Oh yes, guns are so much more efficient. Times have changed since these days: Lynching in the United States or at least the methods have. I have read about more unjustified killing of black people in recent times than in the rest of my 78 years. The KKK is no longer the obvious perpetrator since police and other groups have taken on the mission. The result is the same.
Yes people are dying but the living are suffering too. The intimidation is obvious. White guys parade around with assault weapons and no on cares. Bundy threatens to kill Federal agents and no one cares. Unarmed blacks are being killed all too often and no one cares.
I rejoiced when the Civil Rights Movement made its gains. I thought we were over it. How naive I was. Read on for more about lynchings and parallels.
Mob action has been replaced by police and others with guns. It is still killing of members of one race with no one stopping it.
the practice of killing people by extrajudicial mob action, occurred in the United States chiefly from the late 18th century through the 1960s. Lynchings took place most frequently against African American men in the Southern US from 1890 to the 1920s with a peak in 1892. Lynchings were also very common in the Old West, although victims were of various races.
Lynching in the South is associated with the reimposition of white supremacy by whites after the American Civil War. The granting of U.S. Constitutional rights to freedmen in the Reconstruction era (1865–1877) aroused anxieties among white Southerners, who were not ready to concede social status to African Americans, blaming the freedmen for their own wartime hardship, economic loss, and forfeiture of social and political privilege. During Reconstruction, Black Americans, and Whites active in the pursuit of integration rights, were sometimes lynched in the South. In addition, blacks were intimidated and attacked to prevent their voting. Lynchings reached a peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, following the withdrawal of federal troops and re-election of Democrats to State Legislatures: they passed new constitutions and electoral rules to disfranchise most blacks and many poor whites. They enacted a series of segregation and Jim Crow laws. During the Civil Rights Movement, violence erupted again; notable lynchings of integration rights workers during the 1960s in Mississippi resulted in the galvanizing of national public support for federal civil rights legislation.
The Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites being lynched between 1882 and 1968 with the annual peak occurring in the late 1800s.
So what has changed? Guns are so much more efficient.