According to the FBI, the percentage of murder weapons for 2000 in the USA was:
65.6% Firearms
13.5% Knives or cutting instruments
7.0% Personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc.)
4.7% Blunt objects (clubs, hammers, etc.)
1.3% Strangulation
1.0% Fire
0.7% Asphyxiation
0.3% Narcotics & Poison
0.1% Explosives
This seems a desperately artless set of statistics. Leaving aside the curious
assertion that guns don't kill people … yeah, so why do people make
them and buy them, for their aesthetic value? I'd want to take it back to
the store and demand my money back, "hey, this gun doesn't kill people!"
Anyhow, aside from that, it would seem that compared to the relish of murderous violence in Ancient Roman, this does seem a very poor and unimaginative. Sure, most of the killers are going to be juveniles who can't be expected to be too artful. And of course, in the civilised world the stats would be a lot lower than gun-crazed USA.
Now the Romans were experts. Stripped naked and tied to stakes, starved wild animals would maul them to the bone. Some of the beasts were trained to sexually violate and sodomise their prey before dismemberment - with women being covered in animal fats to make smell tastier.
Of course for a slow death, crucifixion or rectal impalement were popular, or chained to great wooden wheels. Perhaps with blows from spears or hammers to help things along, or with genitals bathed in honey to promote torment by insects, or with great weights hanging off all the limbs.
If you wanted to get nasty, being clamped inside a barrel and having your exposed skin and face smeared with milt and honey to promote torment by insects and, worse, being force-fed milk and honey - so that you're innards would erupt with noxious liquid excrement flexing with intestinal worms, rotting you away in your own filth and parasites over several weeks.
Obviously such smelly slowness was a favourite with the public audiences, who'd much rather see people crushed in giant vices, or torn, ripped and stabbed to death by the blades of rotating metal wheels. They liked to see limbs ripped off, breasts hacked off, innards burst out, skin flailed off, genitals pulped, and anuses buggered by giant serrated metal dildos.
Argh, those Romans really knew how to treat Christians. Yeah, saints got promoted the hard way in those days. Like Saint Laurus, who was eviscerated by a caustic quicklime enema, or Saint Fausta, who was pieced with nails then slowly sawn in half, lengthways, with her vulva as the starting-groove.
Shooting people, now that's for wusses.