Karl Smallwood
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As we've previously discussed, like, a lot, movies are incredibly unrealistic when it comes to portraying everyday people defending themselves against crime. After all, when you look at real-life stories of self-defense, you realize their depictions are far, far too tame.
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China is kind of screwed up when it comes to eviction methods: When a landlord wants you out, they'll think nothing of providing notice in the form of boxes full of live scorpions dumped into your window.
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"One tenant called it the second worst little prick she's woken up to."
So put yourself in the shoes of 38-year-old Shen Jianzhong, who -- along with the rest of his village -- was given an ultimatum to leave his home or there'd be trouble. Eventually 70 of the 100 families in Shen's village gave in and moved, and with so few holdouts the threats only escalated. A gang of men mysteriously appeared and began harassing and beating people in the street. One day when Shen's wife went out to buy some instant noodles, a gang of "30 to 50 men" blocked her way out of the house and shoved her down, which understandably pissed Shen off.
We should mention at this point that Shen was a devoted kung fu fan, because if you're going to live up to Asian stereotypes, live up to them all.
World Record Association
Pictured here trying to fill "love robots" stereotype by apparently turning into a motorcycle.
Shen and his son transformed into a tornado of kung fu moves that presumably had names like the Thundering Hammer of Unconsciousness and the Flaming Tiger Claw of Holy Shit That Hurts, knocking the ever-loving crap out of several of the thugs and scaring the ever-loving crap out of the rest. Unfortunately nobody thought to fire up a video camera during the fight itself, but you can see the aftermath in this video, which shows Shen calmly sitting in front of his house, surrounded by comatose heaps that used to be his attackers while their as-yet-unsmacked-down friends shout useless threats at him (maintaining a minimum distance of 10 feet at all times).
"You just gonna stand there, or you gonna help me sweep these bodies out of my house?"
A few minutes later the police showed up and ... promptly urged Shen to sign the shit out of the papers his landlord had sent, warning him that he could be arrested for assault. Wow, that's the depressing epilogue kung fu movies never show. Then again, maybe they only threatened to arrest him so they could film him beating up an entire prison block and market it to the Western world, because we'd gladly pay the 3-D upcharge for that.
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Saadat Khan was cleaning up his shop, hopefully while whistling a jaunty tune (because that really ties together the whole image we're going for), when a guy walked in and shoved a gun against his head. Unfortunately for this criminal, Khan was no stranger to robberies, and the amount of fucks he didn't give at that moment in time was so staggering that NASA scientists are still calculating their mass.
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"Do we have a brilliant, street-tough janitor who can take a look at this?"
The criminal screamed in Khan's face and demanded he empty the store's register, swearing to God that he'd kill him dead, like, so hard. Khan, showing only slight annoyance at the possibility of having his brains aerated, carefully explained: "You're swearing to God, and you have a gun in your hand. It doesn't make any sense to me. If you believe in God, you shouldn't be holding a gun at my face, so you better leave."
The criminal, who we should stress, had a fucking gun, wasn't fazed by this, because A) Khan was a 49-year-old Indian man who probably weighed 100 pounds soaking wet, and B) He had a fucking gun.
huffingtonpost.com
Possibly a blunderbuss.
Upon coming to the conclusion that the robber wasn't going to leave, even despite his bitchin' speech, Khan strolled to the counter and grabbed a handful of chili powder -- which you'll note is absolutely not money -- threw it in the criminal's face and then punched him with a chili-laced fist for good measure. Now if you've ever touched your eyes or, heavens forbid, your wang after handling chili powder, you can just imagine this criminal's immense pain, which was hopefully only compounded by the punch to the face and the resulting shame he felt as he ran bawling while Khan chased him out of the store.
The best part, though, was Khan's reaction, as he claimed that he wasn't a hero, just a guy trying to do his business.
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His business being whipping up a curry of pure kickass.
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Robbing a bank is never as glamorous as it looks in the movies, but, hey, at least in real life you don't have to worry about some muscle-bound action movie hero busting in and slapping your shit to the ground. That is, unless your name is Matthew Rogers and you decide to rob a bank that Eddie Peoples, Army staff sergeant and Iraq war veteran, happens to be visiting.
abcnews.go.com
"Having kids means I can do my weight training anywhere, anytime."
Rogers walked into a Bank of America in Sarasota, Florida, and pulled out a gun -- otherwise known as "strike one" -- and proceeded to wave it around and point it at random people in the bank. Peoples and his two sons initially laughed at Rogers, thinking that the robbery was a joke. But to confirm his seriousness, Rogers then pointed the gun at Peoples and his children -- "strike two." Upon detecting the threat to his kids, Peoples went straight into Papa Bear mode, constructing a barricade around them from some nearby chairs. And then he switched over from fatherly instinct to Army instinct.
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Peoples' sons, shown here unable to escape his gravitational pull.
Rogers had the bank tellers fill a grocery bag with money, and on his way out he warned that "the big black guy" shouldn't try to stop him. And if he did, "The kid will get it," Rogers added, gesturing with the gun toward Peoples' sons -- "strike three." Peoples "could not let that pass," or in other words, Rogers' teeth became an endangered species at that precise moment.
His threat delivered, Rogers fled the building and ran to his car. Peoples followed. Before Rogers could speed away, Peoples jumped into his van and blocked him in. Realizing that he was stuck between a rock and a hard place, Rogers decided that the only appropriate course of action was to try and jack the rock's van, an idea that ranks right up there on the stupidity scale with using a toaster as a masturbatory aid. The second Rogers put the gun to Peoples' head, Peoples twisted it right out of his hand (or possibly just twisted the hand right off of the arm, we're not sure) and introduced him to sweet Lady Cement.
abcnews.go.com
As demonstrated here on George Stephanopoulos, who presumably changed his underpants immediately afterward.
Peoples stepped over the puddle formerly known as Matthew Rogers and back into the bank, where his oldest son asked, "Did you get the bad man?"
Peoples' response? "Yep, I got the bad man." To which the bank erupted into applause.
Oh, and in case we haven't driven Rogers' insurmountable level of dumbassness home yet: His gun -- the one he used to rob a bank and then condemn himself to a lifetime of suffering from Twisted Arm Syndrome by sticking it in the face of a massive Army man -- turned out to be a realistic toy.
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Steven Gorvett, drug addict, career criminal and opportunistic thief, was strolling through an English neighborhood when his fingers got to twitching. Sitting nearby was a car with its doors open and radio blaring, just asking -- nay, begging -- to be stolen. Steven, not being one to turn down a free quickie from Madame Opportunity, hopped straight into the car and drove away.
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"Eventually, one of my terrible life choices has to pay off, right? It's just odds at this point."
Little did he know, he'd just stolen the T-1000's car.
The car actually belonged to one Mr. Keith Lovegrove, who was fixing a friend's fence when his musical accompaniment unexpectedly did a slow fade-out. Upon looking up and seeing his car rolling away, Lovegrove melded through the fence and sprinted after it.
After a few strides, Lovegrove leapt through the air and clung to his vehicle's bumper, where he was dragged for over 200 agonizing yards. If you're wondering what the hell he was thinking, well, he was thinking that his trunk was open ... and when his car hit a speed bump, Lovegrove used the momentum of the bump to somersault himself into it.
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Experts are still puzzled by how he was able to squeeze testicles that enormous into the trunk of a Civic.
After flipping into the trunk, Lovegrove burst through the backseat and proceeded to grab the thief in a headlock and drag him out of the car, all while traveling at highway speeds (we assume). However, once outside the car the thief managed to anticlimactically punch him in the face and escape.
Wait, how could a hopelessly drug-addicted criminal break free of the kung fu death grip of a guy who, seconds earlier, was clinging to the bumper of a moving car like Marty McFly, except minus the skateboard and plus excruciating pain? Well, it probably had something to do with the fact that Keith Lovegrove was a 54-year-old ex-soldier at the time and officially registered as disabled. Holy shit. Just imagine what the guy was like in his prime. Never got a car (or anything else) stolen from him, for starters.
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"If they tried, I'd have used the trunk in a different way."
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Taitex Phlamachha was walking home with his wife when a mugger decided to try his luck. Now we have to assume that said mugger had no idea that the man he was about to attack was named Taitex Phlamachha, because a name like that could only conceivably belong to a man who knows all the martial arts.
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"I even invented a little something I like to call … Punch-Fu."
Those martial arts just so happened to be karate and taekwondo (the punchingest and kickingest ones, respectively), which gave Phlamachha the confidence to flatly tell his attacker to piss off while ignoring his many threats of facial stab wounds. In the resulting 15-minute fight, the mugger at one point had his knee firmly planted on Phlamachha's chest while he flailed wildly with the knife at his abdomen. How he failed to do fatal damage is up for debate, but we'd like to think that Phlamachha's abs were simply too toned for the mugger's knife to penetrate.
Unsurprisingly, Phlamachha eventually managed to gain the upper hand and floored the mugger with a colon-punishing kick to the body. The mugger then tried to flee, only to be stopped by two lightning-quick donkey punches from Phlamachha. "But wait," you say. "Where was the mugger's knife during all this punching and kicking?" Well ...
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"And the knife bone's connected to the -- wait a minute ..."
That's a post-fight X-ray of Phlamachha's arm. The only problem is, no one knows how or when the 6-inch blade got jammed in there, because Phlamachha didn't even realize it had happened. Presumably because, as a former Gurkha, Phlamachha was trained to suck that shit up.
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"I'm thinking about leaving it in there. You never know when you might need a knife."
The mugger was remanded in custody and told that he should perhaps think about pursuing a different career path, seeing as how being donkey punched with the blade of your own knife is a clear demonstration of lacking the necessary skillset to truly excel at the mugging arts.
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Ivan Marcano, an off-duty NYPD cop, was sitting in the car with his girlfriend when he saw two punks pistol-whipping a man in the street (stay classy, New York). Had this been a buddy cop movie, Marcano would've announced that he was too old for this shit before reluctantly cocking his gun. But unfortunately for the thugs, retirement was not even the remotest glimmer on Marcano's horizon -- because he was nowhere near too old for this shit.
Marcano told his girlfriend to call 911 and stepped out of the car. The moment he identified himself as a police officer, one of the criminals immediately turned and fired a round straight into his chest. The thugs escaped in a white Mustang with a third accomplice, leaving Marcano for dead. His girlfriend helped him back into the car and made a beeline for the nearest hospital.
Richard Harbus for nydailynews.com
All while explaining this wasn't orchestrated to avoid dinner with her parents.
Despite carrying a shooting victim, Marcano's girlfriend dutifully stopped at a nearby red light, presumably because Marcano's natural justice field overpowered her ability to commit even the most innocuous crime while in his presence. And that's when they saw it: a recently crashed white Mustang containing three men, who'd just unknowingly drawn the winningest ticket in the Most Fucked Sweepstakes.
Climbing out of the car, Marcano clamped his left hand (his dominant hand, by the way) over his bleeding chest wound and casually drew his gun with the other. Upon seeing the police officer they'd just blown away walking toward them like the friggin' Terminator, the men scrambled out of the car. Marcano ordered the people in the immediate vicinity to hit the deck before letting off two one-handed shots, taking out his shooter with a headshot.
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"I'm not arresting you anymore."
The other two men, realizing that they were up against a being apparently fueled by bullet wounds and a desire to punish crime in all its forms, ran for it. Marcano actually tried to give chase before a passing ambulance pulled up and asked if he needed help. He stopped for a quick chat with the crew before climbing into the back under his own volition.
While recovering in the hospital Marcano was promoted to detective by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly for his heroism and all-around awesomeness, a moment that was luckily caught on camera since it's doubtful Marcano can remember it through the painkiller haze.
Ed Reed / nydailynews.com
"I promise to do you and the rest of Starfleet proud, Captain Kirk."
Karl wrote a book! Like, a real one! It's full of prank emails he's sent over the years, and you can read all about it on his website or follow him on Twitter.
For more ways real life is so much better than movies, check out The 11 Most Badass Last Words Ever Uttered and The 5 Craziest Soldiers of Fortune To Ever Cash a Paycheck.
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