Absolute bull, as far as the electric chair is concerned. Thomas Edison, a proponent of DC, pushed for the use of the electric chair to show how dangerous AC current was. In fact the first electric chair was developed by Edison’s employees.
Firearms killed over 30,000 people in the US per year since 2005. Normal people are concerned about them whether or not they own a firearm. Ultra-liberals like myself (who excel at cool, calculated risk assessment) put them on par with motor vehicles, which killed some 32,000 in 2011. They ignore the headlines and focus on the facts.
Re the OP: I would be ok with guns and guillotine. But I would also turn around and mock American DP advocates for their thirst for blood. It’s so unfair!
Combine it with an orchestra playing the 1812 Overture and you might have something there.
What you’ll have is the Janitorial Union saying “We ain’t cleaning that up.”
Whe doing a lethal injection, do they swab the area (to prevent infection)?
Or a captive bolt gun.
I oppose the death penalty, but I’d we are going to kill people, we should do it effectively, somewhat humanely, somewhat cheaply, and in a way safe to others.
A captive bolt gun would satisfy all these. It has one major problem, though, which is that there is a single person who unambiguously did the deed. I think the state also wants to avoid that.
Carbon monoxide is highly effective, cheap, and completely painless. (I worked with a guy who once nearly died from carbon monoxide. He did pass out. He described the experience as rather pleasant, until he woke up to a horrible headache.) But it’s a little dangerous others, if it leaks.
Nitrogen is slower, but it is also reputed to be painless. Every year, some unlucky or careless farm worker dies working with fruit in a low oxygen storage facility. If it were painful or obvious, they would escape. Nitrogen is cheap, and if some of it leaks, so what? It’s quite harmless unless it displaces most the oxygen.
So that or a captive bolt gun to the base the skull would my preferences.
Works for me.
I don’t think it would be constitutional to punish someone in secret like that.
The Perfect Master speaks: When someone is executed by lethal injection, do they swab off the arm first? - The Straight Dope
I don’t think that it’s a constitutional issue, but it might be required under state law, and it is certainly customary to have witnesses (esp. the families of any victim(s), and reporters), so I suppose you could have closed-circuit TV coverage of the cell. The witnesses know when it’s going to happen and could gather to watch, even if the prisoner wasn’t told.
But from all I’ve read, prisoners have always been told when they’re to be executed. No reason that couldn’t keep happening, even if you switched to carbon monoxide, nitrogen, extreme cold, etc.
The whole point of the 8th Amendment was to prevent stuff like pressing, burning at the stake, crucifixions, and other sorts of tortures, penal spectacles and torturous execution methods.
What I’m proposing would be none of the above; the only cruel or torturous part would be possibly that the condemned would have no awareness of when they’re going to die. Which would probably be somewhat bad at first, but after a while, you’d get used to it, which seems less stressful and less of a mental torture than someone knowing their date, and sweating that right up until they are put down.
Again I ask, why not just bleed them out?
Seems simple and foolproof to me. No need for exotic drugs, medically trained personnel, questions about pain during paralysis, etc. IIRC, one just drifts off to sleep as their blood drains away. Anything wrong with this method of execution?
Extreme cold is not painless.
Trust me on this one. 
Here’s something I’ve always wondered, and given the passionate extremes in which people go to defend the death penalty, I wouldn’t consider cost to be a significant barrier: when people say companies won’t sell certain drugs to be used for executions, why don’t these governments, states or otherwise, simply manufacture the drugs themselves? Somebody’s doing it, just hire some chemists and make the drugs! Buy the whole supply chain! Then they can pump out these things to their hearts content! There’s probably a market for it now that lots of private companies refuse to sell them. Can’t some state like Kansas or some other conservative bastion say they are going to go all in on the execution system and have their own state-run drug making companies expressly for the purposes of making execution drugs?
Discussed in post 70 earlier:
According to the wiki article on the death penalty in the US, there were 39 executions in 2013. That’s 39 doses. Would the cost of complying with FDA regs be enough to make much money? And far from being"minimally price conscious" customers, death penalty costs are closely scrutinised by death penalty opponents. I wouldn’t be surprised if they started Freedom of information requests on the costs of the drugs. The high cost of enforcing the death penalty generally has become one of the planks used by death penalty opponents, with some success. If the costs of the drugs started to skyrocket, that would quickly be publicised.
[/quote]
There may also be a patent protection issue. If a particular execution drug is still under patent protection, would a state be able to make it against the wishes of the company which holds the patent? (I don’t know anything about US patent law, so I simply raise this as a question.)
It’s been put to referendum and other public vote many times. Sometimes it’s voted down. Most times it’s voted to continue.
You may disagree and decry the trog majority among us, but being stupid about it gains nothing.
[/QUOTE]
According to this site, 31 states have the death penalty, and 19 do not.
How is it possible to say that the death penalty issue has been settled in favour of the continued use of the death penalty when just under 40% of the states have rejected its use?
I’m trying to wrap my head around non-lethal drugs being used to execute someone?? 
Nitrogen is non-lethal. You’re breathing it right now.
And, along with various posters on this thread, I, too, have wondered why not use nitrogen? I used to have to take a confined space entry class annually. We were taught in those classes that going into a low oxygen environment (say a tank that had a nitrogen blanket that had not been fully flushed out) would cause unconsciousness within a few breaths without that person even realizing anything was wrong. Enter the confined space and a breath or few later they fall down unconscious. And, if there weren’t someone standing by (and confined space entry always required someone observing from outside the vessel) that person would stay unconscious until they died minutes later.
Sounded very peaceful to me. Also seemed like a good way to execute people (if you’re going to do that sort of thing).
Nitrogen is not a drug.
I think the FDA would disagree. Compressed Medical Gases in the FDA’s Drug section