Mugging the Monster/Real Life

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Mugging the Monster in Real Life include:

  • 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.
    • 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 and quickly kills and eats it.
  • In a particuarly amusing example of this trope, two yobs attacked a pair of crossdressers only for said crossdressers to turn out to be a couple of cage fighters in fancy dress. Full story here.
    • Speaking of Drag Queens, a valuable lesson is to never pick a fight with one. You will probably lose. To paraphrase a famous queen, "A guy doesn't dress up like this unless he's prepared to get shit for it." Also, two words: Combat Stilettos.
  • Somali pirates attacked a French navy command ship, mistaking it for a cargo ship, leading to the swift arrest of the pirates.
    • And more recently, 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.)
  • In 1993, somewhere in the Pacific, two pirate boats fired machinegun warning shots in the direction of 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" - Russian large landing ship. Being a remake of civilian project it resembles a freighter [dead link] 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 a serial killer 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 and knife, attempted to rob some schoolchildren. The schoolchildren responded by stoning one of the assailants to death.
  • Dressing up policewomen like Ms. Fanservice and sending them out to troll for johns is standard practice for vice squads worldwide. Muggers and psychos occasionally fall for their act, and get snapped up by the decoy or her backup.
  • 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 was captured and held to ransom by some Pirates. Guess who he turned out to be?
    • The story gets better. While being held prisoner on the ship, the personable Julius 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 Coffeeville 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.
    • They were attempting to outdo Jesse James... who had come to grief trying to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota in the 1870s. Unfortunately for Jesse, he had forgotten that he was no longer in his usual hunting grounds of Eastern Kansas/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...
      • Worse yet, Jesse had forgotten about a certain historical event of the previous decade known as the Civil War, and about Union recruitment patterns in rural Minnesota. Something like half the men in town were combat veterans.
  • On September 2, 2010, Bishnu Shrestha was on his way home in East Bengal when forty gangsters stopped the train, boarded it, and started robbing the passengers. Bishnu complied, knowing fighting these gangsters wasn't worth his life - up until the leader of the train-robbers decided to rape a girl. At this point, Bishnu drew a kukri, took the gang's leader as a human shield, and started hacking down thugs left and right. You see, Bishnu Shrestha was a Corporal in the 7th Battalion of the 8th Gurkha infantry. In the subsequent torrent of ass-kickings that followed, three gangsters were killed and eight more disabled by Bishnu's knife, and the rest of the robbers took off in sheer terror. It should be noted that they all had guns, and all he had was his kukri. There's a reason that Gurkas are some of the most feared and respected soldiers out there.
  • 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!
  • 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.
  • 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 on their neighborhood and killed one small Labrador. The owner came home, pursued them in his car with a gun, then held them at gun point 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. 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.
    • Well, the stuff on Walker, Texas Ranger is all fake. It's some of the worst stuntwork Norris has ever done. Which is probably why the younger generation has forgotten that back in his prime, Chuck had won the World Middleweight Karate Championship tournament six times in a row. Seriously, short of going back in time to pick a fight with Bruce Lee it's hard to top being stupid enough to throw a punch at Chuck Norris.
  • Shooting Back recounts an incident where some Islamic 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 precided 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's 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 trainer to UFC fighter Brandon Vera.
  • 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 one of the earlest Society events (circa 1970 or so) in Berkley, CA, a lady who uses the name "Sir Trude Lacklandia" (AKA the first female fighter in the Society) 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, 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.
  • In the 1920's 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, a boxer, usually ranked either first or second on all-time pound-for-pound 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.
  • The infamous Sony CD manufacturer-sponsored rootkit would probably have had a longer run out in the wild if one of the first computers it had infected hadn't belonged to Mark Russinovich—a senior Microsoft executive who invented most of the debugging, process monitoring, and system monitoring utilities for the Windows operating system, was a significant contributor to the Windows source code, and was one of the only human beings on Earth actually capable of doing the kernel-level debugging and audit of Windows XP necessary to find the rootkit in action.
    • It gets better. He was also the developer of Windows' original RootkitRevealer utility.
  • Some rather clumsy scammers were unlucky enough to catch parents of a computer security expert with scareware. Hilarity (and irony of the "antivirus vendors" receiving a "photo of my credit card" infected with the hottest disk-encrypting malware at the time) ensues.
  • In 1937 a mob of Nazi rioters killed a Warner Bros. representative for being Jewish. In so doing they picked a blood feud with Hollywood. Yeah, that was a good idea.
  • Two more cases summarized and linked in a blog article titled A sudden and acute failure of the victim selection process.
  • In April of 2021, an anti-Asian bigot stormed into the Good Choice for Nails Salon near Manhattan's Chinatown and started berating and threatening the staff and customers with racial slurs. When a passerby intervened, she called the Asian American man 'a Chinese mother f-----"; and was quickly arrested by the undercover NYPD officer she had just insulted.
  • In 2014, serial burglar Anthony Hall broke into the home of Stephen Waterfield in order to steal Waterfield's television, only to be caught by the homeowner. Not knowing that his intended victim was a former rugby flanker (and oblivious, it seemed, to the fact that Waterfield was six feet tall) tried to assault Waterfield, only to flee empty-handed wwith two gashes to his head, a black eye and a fat lip, and was later arrested. The judge at his sentencing told Hall that he got what he deserved.
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