Lissa, your comment about jerking the prisoner up gave me a morbid chuckle when I thought about death by being shot out of a catapault…
Human beings are extraordinarily hard to kill. I think your specious feeling that they are fragile has to do with car crashes and bullet wounds and such, none of which are really pertinent when speaking of the hardiness of the species.
I give 10 to 1 odds that the one year old you brought to the emergancy room for a common but messy normal illness was a first-born. If you had listened to your more experienced friends and relatives you would have saved you and your child time, expense and the trauma of an ER visit. The parents of first borns are the worst.
Its probably bad that i think this is funny, but i used to know a bunch of suicidal people. One was telling me about an attempt he made.
He checked into a hotel room, and decided to suffocate himself with a bag over his head. In order to have a ‘no going back’ clause, he tied his hands behind his back after he placed a ziplock bag over his head & sealed it with a rubber band. He started panicking and opened the room door and took off running, it must have been funny seeing someone running around with their hands tied behind their back and a ziploc bag sealed around their head. We both laughed.
Or you cant improvise a garrote.
dauerbach,
Heh . . . well, you’re right about the “firstborn” thing. But I defy you (as a non-doctor) to tell the difference between a bad cough and Whooping Cough; fever and vomiting as being the Flu, and meningitis; crying and lethargy as a stomach ache and a lethal bacterial infection—especially in a human being that can’t talk.
I’d rather look foolish than lose my kid, and I’d do it again with my twelfth-born.
And the paradox still exists: some human beings are extraordinarily fragile, while some are extremely hard to kill. Take Saddam Hussein, for example . . . =+)
I hope samboy doesn’t mind me asking a tangential question in this thread. I meant to ask it a while ago, but didn’t want a dedicated thread… this seems the perfect opportunity to ask it though :
A 24 year-old male friend of mine hanged himself about three months ago. His body wasn’t found for at least three weeks after that. After the funeral, the lad’s inconsolable mother told me that when she was in the Chapel of Rest they wouldn’t let her see his body because of the advanced decay. However they did let her ‘hold’ him through the shroud he was wrapped up in.
She told me that her son’s hands were up around his neck as if he was trying to get the noose off before he died.
My question is, was he doing that? Rather, how likely is it that he was trying to get the noose off? Or might the positioning of the arms to be due to some after-death process such as rigor mortis? The question within the question, which his mother so dearly wants an answer to, is of course Did he really mean to do it?
For the record, he hung himself with a dressing-gown cord tied to the hook on the back of a door, the cord thrown back over the door so he was on the other side. He was only a few inches off the ground; the police were uncertain how he’d done it and speculated that a small chair a couple of feet away was used but this is by no means certain. There was no suicide note; and although he was clinically depressed this was utterly unexpected by his closest friends.
And if they do it wrong?
Sorry, but I don’t think that this is the sort of thing to be recommended over the boards.
Judging by the remarkable mental caliber of the posters on this board that I have seen, it’s unlikely that anyone is about to put the experiment to the test. I don’t think there are too many 13-year olds hanging out here.
I think the evidence is bolstered by Reuben’s post. How many people actually know that the past tense of “hang”–as in by the human neck–is “hanged” and not “hung”?
I rest my case.
Well, he got it right the first time, anyway! I suppose after you’re dead you can’t really be considered human and it’s okay to be “hung.”
Sorry to divide what should have been one post into four, but these old brain cells take a long time to process information, these days.
I think it’s unlikely that Reuben’s friend’s hands were grabbing for his throat in death. One would imagine that the act of dying would relax all the muscles immediately—however, I am not a pathologist.
One patently false portrait of death was in The Godfather: the police chief is shot point blank in the forehead, yet he still has the wherewithal to gurgle, lurch, then plant his face in his food. I don’t think so. He would collapse like a house of cards, immediately and without a single twitch.
Then again, I’ve read all the stories about the dying, “faces contorted in a rictus of agony.” Physiologically it doesn’t make sense, but whaddoIknow?
I once had a friend who corrected my usage of the word with this: “It’s ‘hanged,’ dear. ‘Hung’ is when God gives a man a special gift.”
When it comes to prison hangings, from stories I have heard from a friend of mine who works in the industry, some of these guys are extrordinarily dedicated to dying. One fellow hanged himself by tying the noose to a low shelf, and then crouching down. It must have taken incredible willpower to feel yourself choking and not stand up.
In some prisons, such as supermax institutions, the problem arises in finding something to which to tie your noose. Often the cells are unibody, meaning that the bed is a concrete slab with a mattress, and there are no bars on the window. (Often, there are no windows, for that matter.) There is a shelf-desk combo, but its low to the ground. The ceiling is featureless concrete. One fellow my friend told me about tried to hang himself from the sprinkler head on the wall, and only managed to flood his cell.
It matters little if you take their shoelaces away. A person who is dedicated to dying will find a way. Sometimes they use their pants, or sheets, and one fellow even used his socks. Inmates on suicide watch are given only paper robes and paper sheets to try to prevent this.
Tonbo, when you said there were no 13 year olds hanging around, I assume there was no pun intended?
In the late 1970s a stuntman appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He showed Carson how hangings are sometimes staged for movie and TV. He said that hangman typically draped the noose around the subject’s neck in such a way that there would be a sharp jerk when the trap was swung, breaking the neck, and bringing on instant death. When hangings were staged, however, the noose was arranged so that there would be a very slow constriction. The subject would eventually die of asphyxiation unless he or she had the noose removed in time.
A demonstration was then given where Carson was hanged, then helped back up to the platform by the stuntman.
I remember thinking at the time that this was an extraordinarily dangerous thing to be showing on national television, and that one or more people watching might be morons enough to try it.
There was one. A 14-year-old boy was found hanged in his living room the next morning. Supposedly the TV was still tuned to the local NBC affiliate. The parents sued, lost, appealed, and lost again.
Even with an experienced executioner, hanging is, apparently, not always a precise art. Of the outlaws named Black Jack Ketcham (there were two of them, brothers) said “let 'er rip” as his last words. Butch Cassidy is said to have described this man as the stupidest outlaw he ever met, but here, at least, he spoke with presience; when the trap was dropped his head tore loose from his neck.
Thank you- best tip ever: he tied his hands in front of him, stepped over his hands so his hands were behind his back, and dropped head first to the floor from the upper bunk.
While it may take 1o minutes to die the person would pass out in seconds. There are better ways to do this but also far far worse.
If you mean “best tip for a foolproof suicide” - I don’t think so: What if you fall on your side, or the fall results in “nothing worse” than a broken nose and a bad bump on your forehead?
Anyway, I could be misreading your post. What do you mean by “best tip”?
Thanks Lynndy63, now we have to endure all the “clever” quips about hanging zombies until this is locked.
Given that this thread is more than 10 years old, I am closing it.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator