I was analogizing "torture" with "gun", not "crime" or "shooting". Torture was a tool that the church had on hand and was prepared to use, and Galileo's knowledge of their threat to use torture was what led him to recant. (It was the forcing of his recanting that was the "crime" in my analogy.)
It might be more precise to say that what the church had on hand was an institutionalized practice of torture, but using "torture" to refer to the practice (rather than a particular act) seems within the bounds of accuracy in poetry.
That's a bit contrived - imagine if a presidential candidate mentions how his will was broken by torture in Vietnam, and afterward it's revealed that all that happened was that he was told he might be tortured, so he spilled the beans immediately. I wouldn't expect his poll numbers to go up.
A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).