OK, youse guys.
First of all, you aren’t conscious to feel a hanging whether badly done or well done. I know this to be true from the 100’s of hanging suicides I have examined, plus forensic videos (some guys in this modern age actually set up the videocam and film their own suicides).
You don’t get the neck snap unless you drop more than 8 feet. Just stepping off a chair isn’t gonna do it; comes nowhere near doing it. And even 8 feet would only do it for a small man; most people need 12 to 15; there is a table for the use of hangmen that gives the proper distance for each weight of person. Drop too little, yes, they “strangle”. But it is not at all like being strangled by an enemy. It is much more like a judo strangle.
I have seen four count’em four hanging suicides who managed to crack the neck (one of those actually took his head off - jumped 80 feet). ALL THE REST died unconscious because of the nearly instant results on the brain of carotid compression. When you place that noose around your neck, or that bedsheet, or that dog chain, and you loop it over the garage beam / top of the door / door handle, and bend your knees, step off the chair, or just kneel, from the moment it cinches up over your neck, you are unconscious. All the “strangling” comes from carotid pressure. The carotid takes only 10 lbs of pressure to flatten; your head weighs 10 lbs; just the sagging of your head would do it. The trachea, which takes 36 pounds of pressure, is nearly never affected. You are unconscious for the entire 2.5 - 3.5 minutes it takes to die.
I have been choked out by a judo nidan. It’s incredibly fast and it is painless while it is occurring. The same nidan told me that he was once choked out in competition during a hip throw. His opponent got the sweep and got him up over his hip, grabbed his gi collar, and got the choke in the air. He was unconscious when he hit the ground. That’s fast.
But not dead.
On the other hand, the texts say you have 20 seconds of useful consciousness after you are heart shot. There have been occasions of perps returning fire on police after heartshot. You would feel pain (although likely not much - when Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley he didn’t realize he had taken a bullet through the chest until after they got him in the car; I autopsied a young man, victim of a driveby, who was shot once through the back and it got both heart and lung, and he told 911 he was having an asthma attack because he’d had them before and he knew just how they feel, like you can’t breathe, and he had been running really hard from the car spewing bullets out its window and he figured he’d brought on an asthma attack. The EMS unit wrote “Asthma Attack” on the intake sheet and it wasn’t until they brought him in with full code going on that they realized he was shot).
However, even with twenty seconds of conscious life, you’ll be unconscious for two or three minutes while dying before you are really most sincerely dead.
If they headshoot you instead of heartshoot, lights out. Instantly. Your heart may go on beating crazily for two minutes while your body adjusts to the fact that you have no working brain, but you’ll be standing in front of St. Peter, going, “Man, that was fast.”
I would choose firing squad, no blindfold, and headshot. But it’s for the honor of the thing, and so they can see my tears, not because there’d be any greater pain in being hanged.