Mugging The Monster / Real Life

• Dolph Lundgren is such a badass that, when robbers broke into his house and tied up his wife, he managed to scare them off without even being physically present as soon as they realized whose house they had just broken into.
• On February 24th, 1984, a man named Gary Fadden accidentally cut off a motorcyclist. A while later, the man he had offended, a member of the Outlaws motorcycle gang, returned in a pickup truck with 2 more buddies. They chased Mr. Fadden and his fiance for more than 22 miles, occasionally firing shots at his vehicle. Not knowing what else to do, Fadden drove to his workplace, where he assumed he would be safe, the US manufacturing plant for international arms manufacturer, Heckler & Koch. The pursuers drove their truck through the gate. Gary got out of his car and retrieved a Ruger AC-556 automatic rifle that he had been testing earlier that week. The main biker then hopped out and began to charge Mr. Fadden. Gary fired a burst into the air, to which the biker replied "Fuck you and your rifle" and kept coming. Fadden then shot and killed the biker. He was later tried for second-degree murder, but he was found innocent on grounds of self-defense.
• In a city where armed paramilitaries who carry assault rifles are the only things that keep law and order in most of the city, a robber decided to rob a guy wearing a camo suit, combat boots, and had a red telnyashka showing through his unbuttoned jacket. Do you know who else wears red telnys? Special forces soldiers. In this case, the red telnik was one of the local militia elite troopers, like the ones who go to Mexico to hunt down people from the most feared criminal groups on the planet. Guess what happened to the wannabe mugger. He ended up shot, disarmed, eviscerated with his own knife, and had his testicles crushed. And not necessarily in that order.
• Look up an old series called America's Dumbest Criminals, and watch it to see more examples of this than you can count. A standout example is a guy who tries to mug a cop with a cheap water pistol, a toy the person being mugged recognized as a copy of the same toy he bought his kid. The robber was quickly disarmed, brought to the ground via martial arts, and arrested.
• A variation occurs in nature, but with predators instead of muggers.
  • Tiger Beetle larva feed on ants, and the Methocha wasp looks like an ant. When the larva attacks, the wasp wriggles out of the larva's grasp, paralyses the larva, and then lays its eggs, which hatch and devour the larva alive.
  • Wasps of the species Lasiochalcidia igiliensis will jump into an antlion pit. When the antlion larva tries to attack it, the wasp stings it and lays its eggs, which hatch and devour the larva alive.
  • The Portia Spider will go to another spider's web and tap on it, most likely imitating a trapped insect. When the spider approaches, Portia rushes it, then quickly kills and eats it.
  • The Epomis Beetle Larva. A frog comes along, looking for something to eat, and spots a giant larva acting an awful lot like prey. When the frog tries to eat it, the larva quickly dodges the frog and uses its horns to latch onto the underside or back of the frog before eating it alive. In the rare case that it gets eaten, the frog regurgitates the larva completely unharmed after a couple of hours, and the larva latches on before devouring the poor frog.
  • Skunks are quite unassuming to predators who have never run into one before, and some see them as an easy meal, only to be sent running with a face full of musk.
• In a particularly amusing example of this trope, two yobs attacked a pair of crossdressers, only for the crossdressers to turn out to be a couple of cage fighters in fancy dress. Full story here (Wayback Machine link).
• Modern-day pirates have to rely on outdated equipment to find their targets. Often, they won't know what kind of ship they're attacking until they're almost on top of it. Occasionally, they make a mistake.
  • Somali pirates in a small skiff fired on what they (presumably) assumed was an unarmed freighter. The US Navy guided missile frigate Nicholas promptly returned fire with its deck-mounted, water-cooled, .50 caliber machine gun. (The pirates were captured, their ship sunk, and their "mother ship" subsequently tracked down and also captured.)
  • Somali pirates attacked a French navy command ship, mistaking it for a cargo ship, leading to the swift arrest of the pirates.
  • In 1993, somewhere in the Pacific, two pirate boats fired machinegun warning shots in the direction of an unidentified dry-cargo freighter. And got an auto-cannon warning shot in return, which dissuaded them from trying to board a vessel that's supposed to carry 440 marines. It was Nikolai Vilkov — a Russian large landing ship. Being a remake of a civilian project, it resembles a freighter◊ with its big crane.
• A man attempted to mug a 77-year-old Air Force veteran, who beat his attacker off with a Pepsi bottle after being shot in the balls. Apparently he's okay except for a slight limp.
• There's a case mentioned in one of John Douglas's true crime books where serial killer Wayne Nance broke into a ranch house and assaulted the couple that lived there. As it was a ranch house on a ranch, and in Montana no less, the killer should've at least considered the possibility that the residents would keep guns at home. Douglas cites it as one of the few known instances in which a serial killer got killed by his intended prey in real life.
• In 2008, two men with machetes tried to rob a club in Australia. Inside were fifty members of a motorcycle club, who promptly grabbed the bar stools, chased down the thieves, and hogtied one of them.
• In 2010, three men in South Africa, armed with a firearm and a knife, attempted to rob some schoolchildren. The schoolchildren responded by stoning one of the assailants to death.
  • Something similar happened a couple of years later, also in South Africa. A group of armed robbers entered a school and were then chased by over 500 students. The group of students caught up to the robbers and stoned two of them to death.
• Dressing up policewomen like Ms. Fanservice and sending them out to troll for johns is standard practice for vice squads worldwide, to the point where it was briefly demonstrated in one of Discworld books (and Played for Laughs, because the typically gorgeous blonde officer is also a werewolf and thus the back-up). Muggers and psychos occasionally fall for their act and get snapped up by the decoy or her backup. One especially nasty criminal caught out by this trick was Ronald Evans, a British Serial Rapist convicted of seven sex attacks in Bristol, who assaulted his last victim only for several of her police colleagues to jump out of the bushes and tackle him to the floor.
• This is the entire basis of pedo-hunting, whether by the FBI or Anonymous. You pose as a gullible young girl, wait to be solicited by a child molester, track them down, and either arrest them or just ruin their life.
• In the late Roman Republic, a young Upper-Class Twit, who went by the totally innocuous name of Julius Caesar, was captured and held to ransom by some Pirates. While being held prisoner on the ship, the personable Caesar befriended the pirates and made jokes that when he was ransomed he was going to come back and kill them all. The pirates laughed at their captive's great sense of humor. Later, they found out he wasn't joking.
• In 1890, the three Dalton brothers and two henchmen came riding into Coffeyville, Kansas in order to gain fame by robbing two banks at once across the street from each other. Of course, there were problems with this scheme, notably that before their job was done, word got out among the townsfolk. And a typical Western town had a lot more than five people and an awful lot of guns. Needless to say, that was the end of the Daltons.
• The outlaw Jesse James came to grief when he and his gang tried to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota in 1876. Unfortunately for Jesse, he had forgotten that he was no longer in his usual hunting grounds of eastern Kansas and western Missouri... and the locals not only did not include any sympathizers of his but had their life savings in the bank he was targeting and no sense of humor about losing those savings. Oops... Save for James himself and his brother Frank, the entire gang was killed or arrested during either the robbery or the ensuing manhunt, effectively ending his crime spree. He himself was killed by a member of his own gang six years later to collect the bounty on his head.
• An April 2011 incident in Britain had 3 burglars in for a shock when they broke into a house only to find out it belonged to a soldier who, completely naked, gave chase to one who tried to make off with his car, complete with breaking open the driver's window with his bare hands!
• Two teenage thieves broke into a van parked in a council estate in Manchester, only to find that inside there were four SAS men on a night-time counter-terrorism training exercise.
• Some young men were routinely killing dogs in their neighborhood and killed one small Labrador. The owner came home, pursued them in his car with a gun, then held them at gunpoint until the Texas Rangers appeared and arrested them. The men threatened the man who had held them at gunpoint, saying he did not know who he was messing with. The man then had the Texas Rangers reveal to the men who had killed his dog that he was Marcus Luttrell, an ex-Navy SEAL, who had won a firefight against roughly 80 Taliban fighters and was the only survivor of the battle, after dispatching every enemy fighter.
• Two "tough guys" tried to rob Chuck Norris with knives, under the assumption that what he did in Walker, Texas Ranger was all fake. Unfortunately for them, Chuck is as much of a real-life badass as he is a Memetic Badass. The two ended up with arms so broken that bones were sticking out. The police didn't even handcuff them, partly out of concern for the thugs' injuries, and partly because they were laughing too hard to get the cuffs out.
• Shooting Back recounts an incident where some terrorists tried to shoot up a church, presumably expecting that they'd be able to slaughter people without resistance. Much to their surprise, Charl van Wyck returns fire, thwarting their attack.
• An example out of Ferdinand von Schirach's Verbrechen (a book of cases he presided over as a lawyer). Some skinheads decide that a wimpy-looking man in a neat suit would be a nice diversion. They ended up dead. It was hinted later that the guy in the suit was a contract killer on his way home. He had no papers on him, no mark that could identify him — he didn't speak a single word. They had to let him go because they had no evidence and the thing they had on him was clearly self-defense — there were several witnesses to clear him.
• In February 1997, near Warsaw, highway robbers stopped a car. The men in the car turned out to be the coaches of the Russian and Belarussian teams driving home from the world biathlon championship — as in "skiing and shooting". The car was followed by the team bus — as in "fifty Olympic-class marksmen and equipment". Seeing athletes leaving it with rifles, the robbers guessed it was a good time to exit stage right, and quickly.
• A man asks a driver for a lighter, then pulls out a gun. His victim complied initially... until the mugger let his guard down and showed him why it's a bad idea to mug a Mixed Martial Arts fighter. He ended up with two black eyes, cuts all over his face, and a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the ankle.
• In 2008, a suspected serial killer and his crew invaded the home of Lloyd Irvin, Muay Thai and Combat Sambo expert and one of the world's top MMA trainers. After waking Irving up where he was asleep on the couch, one perpetrator promptly found himself disarmed and they were forced to flee the scene.
• This video showing some poor boob who thought stealing from a professional MMA fighter was a good idea.
• Charles Bronson once related a story in which he was vacationing in Italy, and a mugger came up behind him with a knife and said "You give me money". Bronson turned around and said "No, you give me money." The mugger ran upon realizing he'd just tried to mug the star of Death Wish.
• One such incident has become fondly-recalled lore in the Society for Creative Anachronism: After a Society event in New York City, a lady who uses the name "Sir Trude Lacklandia" was walking home late at night and assaulted by several muggers. When she refused to hand over her cash, one tried to stab her with a six-inch knife — only to have the blade turned by the chainmail she was wearing under her woolen cloak. She then drew her (very real) sword and said "I'll see your six, and raise you thirty-five!" before chasing the muggers off. A bard in the SCA afterwards wrote a humorous song about it, which has become quite popular.
• A middle-aged, five-foot-seven Asian man was accosted by two armed, six-footer African-American muggers in late 2011. One mugger was admitted to a hospital with cracked vertebrae and the other had his arm broken in several places. The uninjured Asian man waited for police to arrive while eating takeaway yakisoba on the curb next to the muggers' unconscious bodies. The Asian man was later identified as a fourth-dan Aikidoka.
• In the 1920s, a group of five men attempted to mug a well-dressed man and his two female companions. When the police arrived, the sidewalk was covered in blood, none of it belonging to the intended victim. The victim was Harry Greb, usually ranked either first or second on all-time, pound-for-pound boxing lists, who had, by this time, acquired a 261-20-17-1 record.
• Around 2008 in Canada, two rednecks in a pick-up truck come across a guy and his girlfriend in a fancy car. They heckle him with lots of cursing and insults while driving right behind them and filming the incident on their camera the whole time. The guy in the fancy car is eventually cornered by the two rednecks at a dead-end; when the rednecks get out of their truck with a baseball bat and walk toward the guy, the guy pulls out a handgun and tells them to back off. The guy's girlfriend takes the camera, and the guy takes the rednecks' truck key and tosses it in a nearby sewer before driving off and later uploading the camera footage to YouTube.
• In the early 1700s, Dick Turpin, famous highwayman, once stopped a gentleman on a coach road and threatened him with a pistol. That 'gentleman' turned out to be Thomas King, another famous highwayman. King was so impressed that he took Turpin as a partner and they robbed and murdered on the Essex roads together for two years.
• In 1999, a thief stole the wallet of who he thought was a tourist in Seville Airport and ran. That "tourist" was Maurice Greene, World Champion sprinter who set the world record for the hundred-meter dash. The thief didn't get very far.
• A thug attempted to rob a gun store — with a police car parked outside. (He didn't survive.)
• In Lebanon in the 1980s, terrorist groups frequently kidnapped Western diplomats and held them hostage. Not so much with representatives of the USSR. As the (perhaps apocryphal) story goes, there was a reason for that. A terrorist group once kidnapped a Soviet diplomat, then cut off his finger, which was sent to the Soviet embassy in Beirut as proof that they had him. The Soviet response, after a short KGB "investigation", was to send a box to the terrorist leader containing his beloved brother's head. The hostage was swiftly released, and Soviet diplomats were never bothered again.
• Also the burglar who broke into the house of an Olympic fencer... while she was training.
• In 2009, a burglar broke into the house that four undergrad medical students were living in late at night. They had already had a Playstation and two laptops stolen earlier that week. When one of the students heard the noise downstairs, he investigated, armed with a katana. When he encountered the burglar, the burglar lunged at him. The med student severed the burglar’s hand and then slashed him down the torso, causing him to die of blood loss at the scene.
• In 1971, legendary boxer Jack Dempsey was taking a cab home with his wife and was accosted by a mugger. Apparently, the mugger never knew what hit him. Dempsey was 78 at the time.
• While Bruce Lee was making a film, one of the actors, assuming all of his moves were fake, insisted on fighting him. He quickly found out that Bruce Lee was a real-life martial arts master, after being quite painfully beaten.
• This video linked on Badass Adorable is security footage capturing a man attempting to abduct a little girl in an elevator. He really had no clue what was going to happen next.
• In 2007, a terrorist attack on Glasgow Airport using an incendiary device failed to take into account the presence of Glaswegians. A nearby cab driver intervened, resulting in a magnificent newspaper headline in the Daily Record: "I kicked burning terrorist so hard in balls I tore a tendon in my foot." Also qualifies as Stupid Crooks in that these individuals considered lighting your car's tyres on fire and driving headlong into a concrete wall an act of terrorism, and then for an encore, one of them managed to set fire to his own trousers while attempting to flee the scene.
• In 2010, a group of forty train robbers stormed a train in West Bengal and started taking valuables from the passengers. One of the train's passengers was a man called Bishnu Shrestha, a small and fairly mild-mannered man who calmly cooperated. One of the robbers then decided to rape one of the women on the train. And Bishnu, a corporal in the 8th Gurkha Infantry, objected. Sternly. Shortly after, several robbers were dead via surgically applied kukri, and the rest were running for their lives.
• Two robbers try to rob Domino's Pizza. The operative word is try, as it turned out the delivery driver in the store was an armed, off-duty veteran sheriff's deputy working a night job. Entering the store using the old-fashioned bandannas-over-faces technique, the robbers brandished guns and demanded money. Seeing as how they were already armed, the deputy responded in his official capacity, and both robbers ended up getting shot instead. Domino's not only agreed to the deputy's subsequent request for two weeks' leave but is making it paid leave to boot. Humorously enough, the deputy in question is named Shaft. No word on any resemblances to Richard Roundtree.
• A serial pervert in Pittsburgh got the bright idea to yank down the pants of a woman who was jogging past him in a park to grab her butt, but little did he know she was a US Federal Marshal — i.e. someone whose job it is to chase down criminals — who promptly identified herself, chased after him, kicked him in the crotch when he resisted arrest and beat the shit out of him. The Marshal's only injury was to her pinky finger, while by all accounts he was in considerably worse shape by the end.
• [e-mail] from The High Road (a popular gun forum) recounts the tale of a man who was ambushed by a kidnap for ransom gang. The man in question was a IPSC competitor. The end result: at least three kidnappers shot and the rest fled.
• This page tells the story of a Miami carjacker who tried to carjack The Florida International University judo team. No points for guessing how that went.
• Two burglars made the mistake of breaking into the house of Scottish footballer Duncan Ferguson, a contemporary of Vinnie Jones and a man whose nickname when playing was "Duncan Disorderly" for his Unnecessary Roughness. Unfortunately for the would-be thieves, he was home at the time. One of the robbers spent three days in hospital.
• Andrew Jackson was the first United States president to have an assassination attempt made against him. Note the word "attempt." Unemployed Englishman Richard Lawrence attempted to fire two flintlock pistols at the President as he left a funeral, but both weapons misfired and did not shoot. Not that it would have done him much good. Jackson had been a duelist for years before, with between a dozen and some hundreds of duels under his belt. He'd been shot numerous times before, including several direct hits to his torso, and at this point while Jackson was not necessarily Immune to Bullets, he was pretty close to it. Lawrence should have paid attention to his recent history—Jackson was also a celebrated general of The War of 1812 and so had lots of military experience (and might possibly have been holding a grudge about the whole 'burned down the White House' thing). The 67-year-old Jackson turned around and beat the crap out of Lawrence with his cane. When help finally arrived, they ended up having to stop Jackson from killing Lawrence. To this day, Jackson remains the only president to stop his own attempted assassination and capture his would-be assassin.
• A woman in Charleston, West Virginia shot and killed an alleged serial killer with his own gun.
• A burglar in Indianapolis seriously picked the wrong house to rob. The homeowner killed the lights, knocked him out with her bare hands, and then held him at arm's length with her Japanese sword while she called 911.
• Powerlifters are the physical embodiment of Stout Strength. They may look rotund, but most of that is muscle, not fat, and many make a hobby or career of lifting several times their own body weight. Some people still think it's a good idea to pick on "the fatty", whereupon they learn the hard way that the operative word in the sport of powerlifting is power. One man decided to harass a powerlifter who was quietly drinking at a bar. He is quickly relieved of the idea, as well as his consciousness, in a single punch.
• This US Marine shares a humorous story of the time he and a few of his fellow Marines foolishly got into a snowball fight with Norwegian schoolkids. Protip: even if you are a Marine, if you grew up in Texas or North Carolina, you are not as good at snowball fighting as Norwegians.
• On September 23, 1989, in the Hilltop neighborhood of Tacoma, Washington, resident Bill Foulk, a US Army Ranger Staff Sergeant, was having a cookout with several of his friends (also Army Rangers) and their families. He and his party were attacked by local drug dealers in retaliation for Foulk's attempts to organize neighborhood watch and protection programs, which included videotaping of a nearby "crack house". In a gun battle lasting more than 10 minutes, over 300 rounds were reported to have been fired from semiautomatic pistols, rifles, and shotguns; without a single injury resulting on either side. Foulk's party was not prosecuted for their participation in the shooting, as city officials deemed it a clear case of self-defense. Their commanding officer was less forgiving, however; and ordered them to spend several months of extended time on the firing range for failing to hit their targets.
• Lee Marvin, a pretty tough guy himself (he was a decorated WW2 vet), once picked a fight with Roger Moore, accusing him of looking and being too wimpy to be a credible action star. Moore convincingly kicked his ass. Afterwards Marvin was heard saying:
  Lee Marvin: The guy is built like granite! Nobody will ever underestimate him again!
• In June 2016, a pair of robbers tried to stick up a McDonalds in Besançon, France. Unfortunately for them, among the patrons were a team of off-duty GIGN members (anti-terrorist Special Forces). They patiently waited for the robbers to exit to avoid any casualties among the customers, then picked them both (one of the perps got shot in the abdomen for refusing to surrender and threatening them with his gun). Nobody was wounded on the side of the gendarmes or civilians.
• During the Vietnam war, a particularly rowdy Vietnamese soldier found himself having an argument with the Korean hand-to-hand instructor for the army. After the soldier proclaimed that knife-fighting could beat any martial art and issuing a challenge, martial artist Hwang Jang Lee, who would become an actor famous for his roles as a villain in Kung Fu films such as "The Snake in the Eagle's Shadow" and nicknamed affectionately "Bootmaster" and "Thunderfoot" and who had started learning Tang Soo Do at an early age, politely declined the challenge. The knife-toting soldier, however, still decided to attack the unarmed man. Dodging and repositioning himself, Hwang Jang Lee fired a roundhouse kick at his temple, with such tremendous power that the soldier died immediately. Hwang was cleared of all charges, as he had acted in self-defense. Thunderfoot, indeed.
• A recently-released felon thought he had found his next victim when he stopped a blue-eyed, blonde, frizzy-haired beauty in Dallas, Texas, asking her all sorts of questions. When she grew uncomfortable and tried to walk away, he thought he'd grab her by the wrist and subdue her. 5-time World Kickboxing Champion and Kung Fu San Soo 8th degree Master Kathy Long then proceeded to grab and crush his groin, hit his back of the head with her forearm, and kick him in the ribs repeatedly while he was crumpled on the ground. The assailant was left with a ruptured testicle with internal bleeding, broken ribs, and a concussion. Appropriately, Long's in-ring nicknames include "The Princess of Pain", "The Queen of Mean" and "The Punisher".
• Joe Lewis, Karate, Kickboxing and Full Contact Karate Heavyweight World Champion, father of modern Kickboxing and Full Contact Karate, called the "Greatest Karate fighter of all time" by his peers (including Chuck Norris), recalls on one of his instructional videos how he got his signature devastating side kick. His old Master in Okinawa was once minding his business, walking on the street, when he was confronted by 5 assailants. Using only his side kick, the Master managed to hit 3 of them. 2 ended up in the hospital, while one died of his injuries. The other two had managed to get away. This explains why throughout all of his life, Joe Lewis maintained the side kick as his signature technique.
• Military oilers often get mistaken for regular tanker ships, especially in low-light conditions. This has led to more than one group of pirates trying to seize them, only to find out these ships often have rotary cannons on board and even if they don't, an assault rifle for every crew member. Never mind that they have the navies they serve on speed dial so to speak.
• In early 2017, members of a Syrian pro-government militia (Desert Hawks) notorious for protection rackets spot a small motorcade driving towards the town of Qardaha. Figuring it belongs to a businessman or government official with money to spare, they stop the convoy and do their usual spiel about threatening arrests if they're not paid. Except this particular convoy happens to be carrying the President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, who was heading to Qardaha to visit his mother's grave. The whole group present was thrown in jail by Assad's soldiers and the entire Desert Hawks militia was subsequently disbanded in August 2017.
• This trope is the reason why the quote "it's always the quiet ones you gotta watch out for" exists. If you Google it, you'll come across stories of bullying victims with reputations of being quiet getting fed up and physically fighting back against their tormentors. Here's a good article with one of the stories explaining this phenomenon.
• Ever wonder why you so seldom hear about Russian diplomats being kidnapped? After a Hezbollah-linked group attempted it in the mid-1980s, the KGB reportedly responded by kidnapping several of the suspect's relatives, castrating and killing one, and mailing his manhood home. The diplomats were released without further incident. You do not want to mess with Mother Russia. You wouldn't like her when she's angry.
• A gang of street punks thought that harassing Donnie Yen's then-girlfriend in a nightclub was a good idea. Yen at first tried to be diplomatic, then elected to leave the club rather than abuse the owner's hospitality. When the eight strong group decided to follow him outside and continue Yen finally lost patience and put every single one of them in hospital while remaining untouched himself.
• Jackie Gleason recalled how while on stage one night, he was continually heckled by a short fat man in the audience. Gleason grew so irate that he eventually asked the man to step outside. The next thing Gleason remembered was waking up in his dressing room having just been knocked out cold. The short fat man was none other than "Two Ton" Tony Galento, a former heavyweight contender who had once fought Joe Louis for the world heavyweight title.
• Bernhard Goetz, the "Subway Vigilante," is one of the most famous and controversial examples. Goetz was a nebbishy, 37-year-old electronics salesman who had been left with permanent injuries after getting mugged by a trio of youths in 1981. While riding the subway in 1984, he was surrounded by four black teenagers who demanded he give them five dollars. In response, he immediately stood, drew a concealed handgun, and emptied it into the teens, leaving them all severely injured. The incident became national news and divided the nation between those who applauded him for standing up to street crime and those who condemned him with accusations of overreaction and racism.
• A man sees a woman on the street and decides that she would be a good target to rob. He then found out the hard way that she's a member of the UFC.
• A mugger in Brazil saw a group of parents waiting outside a private school to drop their kids off. He decides to pull out a gun and loudly announce a robbery directed at them. A few minutes later, he's in the back of an ambulance in critical condition with three bullets in him because one of the mothers was in fact, an off-duty member of the Military Police.
• During The River War, the Mahdists, still riding high on their victories against the British and Egyptians in spite of the latters' victory at Toski, decided to raid the weaker Italians at south. The First Battle of Agordat and the Battle of Serobeti were such hilariously one-sided defeats for the Mahdists that the 1893 offensive defeated at Second Agordat firmly went into Bullying the Dragon territory-especially as the Italians actually retaliated and conquered Kassala to get some peace.
  • On a more general level, the entire war from 1884 onwards: the Mahdists were mostly armed with traditional melee weapons, and when it came to what little firearms they had, most of which were ancient muzzle-loaders with only a few being modern firearms captured from the enemy, they lacked firing discipline, so the British, hoping to avoid an expensive war that would have savaged Egypt's fragile economy, offered to leave Sudan under their control in a form of protectorate. The Mahdists instead besieged Khartoum to prevent the retreat of the Egyptian garrisons and eventually massacred them, earning Britain's enmity and, once they had rebuilt Egypt's economy, the devastating 1898-99 offensive that wiped the Mahdists out. In the meantime, they attacked Ethiopia, embroiled in a civil war and targeted by Italy for colonization, and the Italian colony of Eritrea, and while the attacks against Ethiopia were a success the Italians and their colonial troops, who had modern firearms and proper fire discipline, gave them the defeats mentioned above and then made their own move on Ethiopia.
• Lana Turner was once involved with low-level mobster Johnny Stomponato. Stomponato was very jealous and stormed onto a movie set once to threaten Lana's co-star Sean Connery. Unfortunately, for Stomponato at least, Connery had grown up tough in Glasgow, and promptly KO'd him. Being Too Dumb to Live, Stomponato went on his merry way, abusing and threatening Turner, until one night when he was threatening to cut Turner's face or throw acid on her, Turner's daughter Cheryl overheard... and came running in with a knife and stabbed him to death. Cheryl was acquitted very rapidly.
• The story of how Josef Stalin sent multiple assassins after Josip Broz Tito, prompting Tito to send the following letter and stopped Stalin from any further attempts.
  "Stop sending assassins after me, we've already captured 5 of them. If you won't stop, then I will send a fast-working one to Moscow, and I certainly won't have to send another."
• In 2012, veteran rapper and current actor, LL Cool J, walked in on someone robbing his house and gave him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. Clearly, "Mama said knock him out."
• A Jamaican telephone scam ended up targeting elderly people in an attempt to steal their money. Unfortunately, one of the people they targeted was William Webster, former director of both the FBI and CIA. The former director quickly reported the scam to the FBI, and the scammers were eventually caught and sentenced to 6 years in prison.
• In April of 2020, a former champion high school wrestler believed to be blitzed out on PCP broke into the house of former UFC title challenger Anthony Smith, a 6'4 light-heavyweight. Anthony pummeled the intruder for five straight minutes until the police arrived. However, Smith admitted that he was terrified throughout the encounter that the intruder might produce a deadly weapon and also expressed amazement that the man never stopped fighting no matter how many times he was hit. Smith's candidness and humility caused many armchair critics in the fighting community to roast him as a wimp.
• In January 2021 a group of hedge funds decided to make a quick buck by shorting 140% of the shares of mall video game retailer GameStop (never mind how they sold off more shares than existed). A thread on day-trading subreddit r/wallstreetbets took notice of the now dirt-cheap shares and a bizarre Internet Counterattack ensued from a coalition of day-traders, annoyed gamers, and economic activists, jacking the shares up over $300 from their initial level and costing the hedge funds billions. It also indirectly led to a class-action lawsuit against a day-trading app that tried to stop the buy-up by selling GameStop shares without users' permission: so many people tried to sign onto the suit that the Southern District of New York court website crashed. At least one of the hedge funds ended up shutting down after suffering massive losses.
• In August 2019, a man in a clown mask attempted to rob a McDonalds on a suburban retail park in Coventry, England. Apparently he failed to take into account the fact that Maccies is usually the only place to buy a cup of coffee after about 6PM in many places and therefore tends to be quite popular with the police. Nobody had even managed to slip away and call 999 from outside when a couple of officers happened to walk in, see what was going on and subdue the unlucky robber with a taser.
• In this New York Daily News article from 2009, 24-year-old Gregory McCalium tried robbing his 72-year-old neighbour Frank Corti with a knife over a noise complaint he has received, not knowing he was a retired boxer, marine, and hand-to-hand instructor. The would-be robber ended up with a black eye and a bruised lip with Frank none the worse for wear as shown in his mugshot.
• In December 2020, a middle-aged woman calling herself "Reggie" spotted two 20-somethings canvassing her mother's neighborhood in Georgia. She asked if they would be willing to be interviewed, and the male canvasser agreed. Quickly into the interview, however, Reggie started grilling him on various hot-button political issues from the opposite side of the political spectrum, making the innocent interview feel more like a partisan ambush. Unfortunately for Reggie, she happened to be ambushing the prolific YouTuber Destiny, who makes his living debating politics. He effortlessly defended his positions on a wide range of topics and ultimately uploaded the entire interview onto his channel to show off.
• In January 2019, a man tried to force a woman into his car in Charlotte, North Carolina. When she managed to break free, he followed her. Into a karate studio.
• June 21, 2022: a man tried to rob a store in Houston with a "bladed object." A gun store.
• 14 September, 2021, a 34-year-old man decides to pick on a 16-year-old boy and finds out the hard way that the boy is a junior Jiu Jitsu World Champion.
• In 1989, 68-year-old former Professional Wrestling world heavyweight champion Buddy Rogers was eating a sandwich at a sandwich shop in Philadelphia when a man began using "abusive language" towards waitresses in the shop. After Rogers intervened, the younger man, who was taller and heavier than Rogers, called him old and challenged him to a fight. Rogers tossed the man around the shop until the younger man begged Rogers to stop. Rogers received fourteen stitches but recalled that the worst part was being called old as he was only 68.
• This YouTube video in which a small car filled with thugs decides to try to rob an armored car that outweighs their car by an order of magnitude.
• On August 20 1942 the Red Army forces on the Don launched an assault on the Italian troops in the area to try and cut off the Germans besieging Stalingrad, and routed the "Sforzesca" infantry division. Four days later at night three battalions in reconnaissance, totaling 2,500 men, found an Italian cavalry regiment of 700 troopers near Izbushensky and surrounded it, and after being found by a patrol opened fire with mortars... To which the Italians replied with 75mm field guns from the attached horse artillery detachment before charging by squadron. The Soviet troops broke and ran at the third squadron, stopping their offensive by 24 hours as the rest of the division tried to make sense of what had happened to their vanguard and allowing the "Sforzesca" to reach a safe position and regroup.
• In January 2012, a group of Ruthless Modern Pirates attacked the Patiño, which they believed to be an ordinary cargo ship. Turns out it was actually a Spanish Navy warship with 180 Spanish Marines onboard.
• Implied in this story on Reddit. Apparently, there was string of robberies against pizza delivery drivers so, one of them took to delivering pizza with an Uzi hidden inside a pizza bag.
• In 1998, a group of eight muggers in Cape Town armed with baseball bats and knives attempted to mug a seventy-year old tourist from Britain. Unfortunately for the muggers, their chosen target was Joe Robinson, a former Wrestling champion, stuntman and martial arts teacher with an eighth level black belt in Judo and a fifth level black belt in Karate. Joe took out two with flying kicks, another with a devastating Karate chop and broke the arm of the fourth man. The other four simply fled and Joe went back to enjoying his holiday.
• A man at the 2019 Arnold classic tried the dumb move of drop-kicking freaking Arnold Schwarzenegger. He failed and was promptly restrained after the ill-thought-out stunt. To add insult to injury, Schwarzenegger, despite reaching his 70s by the event, didn't even notice until he saw the footage, and tanked the move without even flinching.
• Mugger Willie King probably thought he scored an easy payday when he swiped the wallet of 94-year old Yolande Gigante in 1996. He was quickly caught...and the police promptly told him his target was the mother of Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, the most powerful mob boss in all of New York. King immediately wondered how he could be so stupid. When he was tried in court, King made very, very sure the Gigantes knew how sorry he was and hoped that they'd be willing to put it behind them. Fortunately, given that Yolande wasn't injured or upset by the mugging, the Chin's brother assured King he had nothing to worry about.

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