Assassin Outclassin / Real Life

• You know Qin Shi Huang, first emperor of China? He once survived an assassination attempt made by the king of Yan during his conquest of China by avoiding the initial attack, running away and around a pillar Benny Hill style until his doctor threw his bag at the assassin to incapacitate him, and then drawing his overly long ceremonial sword to stab him to death. He promptly passed out due to exhuastion. If you've ever watched Technoblade comment on the duel with Dream, then this is the event he's describing.
• Mithridates VI of Pontus (modern-day Anatolia) was a king in the evening years of The Roman Republic who regularly ingested poisons in order to make himself immune. It seems to have worked, since he managed to be a constant thorn in Rome's side, and we don't even know how many attempts there were on his life since he survived all of them. When he eventually overreached and Rome came crashing down on him, he attempted to take his own life with poison but failed due to the aforementioned immunity (a friend killed him with a dagger).
• Charles V ordered his grand admiral Andrea Doria to capture his Ottoman counterpart Hayreddin Barbarossa by any means necessary. Now, Doria was a talented admiral and was definitely the best in the whole of Christiandom, but Barbarossa was simply too good for him, eventually giving Doria a hard defeat in Preveza (though in this case infighting had much to do with the Christian defeat). Although Doria managed to make Barbarossa flee from him a few times, the Turk retired shortly after and the Christians couldn't get their hands on him.
  • Doria had more success with Barbarossa's captain, the equally famous Turgut Reis or Dragut, who was defeated and captured in Girolata, but Barbarossa managed to get him free through money and pressure.
• Spanish privateer Alonso de Contreras had a bounty put on him by the Ottoman Empire, but he avoided capture and defeated many of those trying to get it.
• Richard Lawrence tried to assassinate the elderly Andrew Jackson with a pair of pistols. Unfortunately for him, both of them misfired, and Jackson subsequently gave him a serious beating with his cane to the point that Jackson's security had to stop him from beating the guy to death. Talk about Bullying a Dragon.^note Jackson had survived dozens of duels, carrying multiple bullets in his body to the end of his life, and openly boasted about having killed many opponents, plus stating his only regrets were not killing some political adversaries. Lawrence was thus probably lucky he didn't have a gun on him at the time.
• 18th century Spanish captain Antonio Barceló got a bounty put on his head by the Northern African powers due to his prolific activities hunting down Muslims pirates and slavehunters. All the bounty hunters that tried to take it ended up adding up to his records.
• Cassius Clay (the 19th century politician, not the boxer who became Muhammad Ali) survived at least two assassination attempts by pro-slavery partisans. He was shot during a speech in 1843 but it deflected off the scabbard of his Bowie knife. He then ran down the assassin and cut off his nose and one eye (possibly an ear too). He then threw him down an embankment. Another time he was attacked by several pro-slavery partisans with Bowie knives, and unfortunately dropped his own. He managed to wrest one from one of his assailants and killed one of them before passing out from blood loss.
• Zog I, Skanderbeg III of the Albanians survived over 55 assassination attempts. He also carried a personal sidearm (a tradition carried on by his son Crown Prince Leka) and is said to have exchanged gunfire with potential assassins on at least one occasion.
• There were over 40 attempts on Adolf Hitler's life, mostly by his subordinates. Most of them were caught by his security detail before they could prove an immediate threat, others were foiled merely by random chance. Hitler avoided three separate bomb attacks this way, the first two by simply leaving ahead of schedule, the third (and most famous one) when he was shielded from the worst of the blast by a wooden table leg. In a slight subversion of this trope Hitler often admitted that it's virtually impossible to actually stop a fanatic determined to kill you, and that rather than fight off the attempt it was better to live randomly, keep odd hours and no schedule so you can be some place else when the attack came and the attacker can not easily find you (this being his excuse for always being late to events). That said the entire regiments of bodyguards helped there and it's telling the attempt that came closest (the July plot) was an inside job.
• Soviet World War II sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko was the most accomplished known female sniper in history and 36 of her 309 kills were German snipers with orders to kill her.
• Fidel Castro survived over 638 assassination attempts from the CIA. These assassinations have ranged from exploding cigars to mafia-style shootings. Castro himself was well aware of the numerous failed attempts on his life and once said, "If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal." He went to say that when he died, no one would believe it (although he was wrong in this). He once told Putin the only reason he was still alive is because he refused to have his subordinates manage his security and always dealt with it himself. He also hated Call of Duty: Black Ops, which just happens to start with a mission where you shoot him in the head, although of course this is a double.
• Charles de Gaulle allegedly survived 31 assassination attempts, the most notable being in 1962 when his car was hit by machine gun fire. He had roughly 140 rounds fired at him!
• A man in Portland, Oregon hired a hitman to kill his estranged wife. After a protracted struggle, the woman was able to disarm the hitman and subsequently strangled him to death.
• Carlos Hathcock, a Marine sniper in Vietnam, was so infamous amongst the North Vietnamese Army that the NVA offered a $30,000 bounty on him, 15 times more than the highest bounty they had offered before. When enemy counter-snipers tried to earn that bounty, he dispatched them handily. One counter-sniper, given the Code Name "Cobra" by the Marines, had killed several American soldiers and was moments from killing Hathcock when Carlos killed him with a Scope Snipe. By his own admission, he caught the sniper by sheer chance, having noticed something glinting in the forest and deciding to take a shot at it, and had he not fired when he did, he'd have been on the receiving end of it.
• Hathcock wasn't the first sniper to draw such ire, as Simo Häyhä managed to piss off the Soviet army so much^note  542 confirmed kills with a non-scoped rifle, ~200 with submachine gun that they sent counter-snipers after him (he was unharmed), bombed the area he was thought to be in (he was unharmed), and one sniper managed to finally place an exploding round in Hayha's face... quickly earning a regular round in his head, and Hayha staggered off to the nearest Finnish unit, getting sent to the hospital. Interestingly, the USSR withdrew 11 days later, the same day that Häyhä woke up from a coma. The jokes about the Soviets having heard about this and saying Screw This, I'm Outta Here practically wrote themselves.
• At the end of the Ninth Crusade, Edward I fought off and killed an assassin sent for him (in one version of the tale, sent by The Hashshashin). He was, however, wounded by the assassin's supposedly poisoned blade and was weakened for several months afterwards.
• A message from Josip Broz Tito was found in Josef Stalin's personal papers following the latter's death:
  Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle... If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send a very fast working one to Moscow and I certainly won't have to send another.
• Bulgarian political party leader Ahmed Dogan once escaped a murder plot during a televised speech when an assassin jumped on the stage in front of the audience and shoved a gun in his face. Dogan smacked the gun away and tackled the assassin to the ground before audience members ran up to help.
• Bill Clinton failed assassinations:
  • One would-be assassin tried to fly a stolen Cessna into the side of the White House but crashed into the lawn instead. The First Family wasn't even there at the time.
  • One maniac simply stood on the sidewalk outside the White House grounds and sprayed bullets at a group of men on the distant White House lawn, thinking one of them was the President. None of them were. He was subdued by random passers-by, having failed to even injure anyone, much less kill the president.
• Gangster Mickey Cohen survived numerous attempts on his life, most of them ordered by rival mobster Jack Dragna.
• During a visit to Georgia (the sovereign ex-Soviet republic, not the US state) George W. Bush and Georgian leader Mikhail Sakashvilli were subject to an assassination attempt with a grenade thrown at the two. It failed. Maybe that is why Bush later displayed surprising dodging skills when an enraged Iraqi journalist threw two shoes at him at a press conference.
• In 2011, an assassin tried to kill US Congressional Representative Gabby Giffords at a constituent event. She was shot; but before she could be killed, two bystanders grabbed the magazine for his gun and hit him over the head with a chair. Then a retired US Army colonel who had gotten between the assassin and Representative Giffords tackled him to the ground.
• During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine; Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was reportedly the target of more than a dozen failed assassination attempts. Zelensky quipped "Do you remember that film, Groundhog Day?"