I'm starting to be annoyed by the hypocracy of this whole deal. Yes, beheaded people's heads live up to a minute after point of detachment. One minute of quickly diminishing awareness, but still awareness. This is ugly, and likely quite painful, and disturbing on a gutteral level because we don't witness it every day. People being hung likely experience similar 'detachment', with the added disadvantage that some level of autonomous nervous system function would keep the lungs and heart working to feed oxygen to the brain considerably longer than a pure 'draining'... assuming they were hung properly by spinal cord severance, and not left to 'dangle and strangle'.
By contrast, a person dying from an abdominal bullet wound can take hours or days to die, dependant on blood loss and infection levels. By all accounts of people who've experienced such wounds, little other pain ever before (or since, in the case of survivors) compares. Yet we see countless graphic depictions of such wounds daily, and hear first hand stories of people left to die under those conditions, and few people cringe and wail and gnash their teeth at the 'barbarians' leaving people to die with those injuries over a period of hours or days.
Don't delude yourself that anyone dying of hanging, shrapnel, or bullet wounds are somehow dying a cleaner, less painful, more honorable death. They are every bit as barbaric, only differing in the method of delivery.
