When it comes to self defense, I suppose you have to do what you have to do if your life is in danger…so these stories are not for the faint of heart.
Because that’s exactly what these people from AskReddit did.
Here are their stories.
1. Florida
“My great uncle lived in a trailer in a rural area of Florida. A kid (17) broke in one night and held him at knifepoint. He had no money, and told the kid that. He also told the kid to leave or he will grab the shotgun next to him.
Kid charged and slashed him, then he shot him dead. They ended up charging his friend (driving get away car) with the murder. Turns out they robbed several trailers that night. Chose the wrong one.”
2. Rural justice
“My great grandmother was widowed in rural greece after WW2. Her sister was in an abusive relationship, and my great grandmother told her husband “if you hit her one more time I will kill you”.
He obviously hits her, so my great grandmother goes to his poker game with all the elite men in the village and shoots him square between the eyes. No one questions the rural justice imposed and she lives out the rest of her life a dominating figure in the village.”
3. Wedding reception
“My parents story: during their wedding reception, two men with masks entered and announced they’d be robbing them. Everyone thought it was a prank, laughed it off, and went on with the party. They pulled out guns and said it was no joke.
Everyone was on the ground on all fours, and they went around collecting wallets and jewelry from the guests. They came up to my grandpa (I’ve never met him) and saw what looked like a wallet in his breast pocket (it was a date book) and asked him to hand over his wallet. He said he didn’t have one (cause he didn’t) and was punched in the stomach. My uncle looked up at the guy and had a gun put to his forehead and was told “I’m going to blow your fucking brains out.”
My uncle grabbed the gun and turned around, pulling the guy’s face into his shoulder. My grandpa and others tackles him down and held him down. The second guy went running off, and my dad (ran track on college) chased after him and tackles him. Him and others pin him down.
Police come and everyone is excited that the ordeal is over. The cops say something like “this is going to take a bit longer though, there was a death.” Freaking out, my family asks who and find out the first guy was suffocated from being held down. (Later it was confirmed he was on cocaine and died from something related to his heart).”
4. Russia
“This happened to my dad in Russia, back in the 90s, which were wild there.
My dad is a big fat guy who can’t fight for shit. He’d recently gotten an 8 month old puppy, and he took the puppy for a walk. He was and still is a smoker of MORÉ cigarettes – I think they only exist in Europe.
Two young guys walk up to him and ask for a cigarette. He says he doesn’t have any. Now that brand of cigarettes that he smokes – they are really long – and the pack is sticking out of his pocket. The young guys get pretty pissed and one of them shoves dad. When my dad falls down, the guys take out a telescopic truncheon.
Dad knows it’s a losing battle but he unclips the dog’s leash so he could swing the metal clip at least.
Now, there is one important fact that I left out about this puppy. He was a Caucasian Sheepdog. At 8 months, he was about 75 lbs. And he went fucking ballistic. Both guys end up in ICU, one loses an eye.
The cops want the dog killed, and dad has to pay a lot of bribes to keep that from happening. The dog ends up living a nice happy 13 years.”
5. You’re free to go
“Obligatory “Not me, but my Grandpa”, but here goes. Grandpa was something else. Arrested several times during prohibition for running stills in the hills of Appalachia and other colorful sorts of stuff. Anyway, many years after that, he was in a bar somewhere in town.
Some young asshole got in his face, as young assholes do. Words were exchanged, the young guy pulled out a gun, and he stuck it in my Grandpa’s face.
Grandpa didn’t have time to determine the extent of the young man’s commitment to his actions, so he decided to pull out his gun and kill him right there. Cops were called, witnesses were interviewed, and Grandpa was free to go.”
6. Knocked out
“Not me, but my dad had to knock someone out with a pipe wrench.
My dad was in his mid-twenties and had just started up his HVAC company. It was late at night, one of his customers called about his tenant’s complaining the air was out. At 3am. My dad, as a recent business start-up all on his own, got dressed and went out on the call.
He got there and fixed the AC and when he was leaving (it was a bit of a run down, poverty stricken area), a man who was clearly drunk thought he was with his girlfriend who was living in the house my dad just worked on. My dad, obviously, was like no, I’m the HVAC repair guy. Dude pulls out a knife and charges my dad and my dad simply swings at him with what was in his hand, which was a wrench. Knocked the guy in the temple and he was out cold.
Dad kinda panicked and jumped into his van and sped off. Nothing ever came of it so I assume the guy was ok, aside from a massive headache.”
7. Whoa
“I’m a medic and firefighter. We got called to a rollover accident new years morning. Obviously a drunk driver. It was 3am. We were first on scene, walked up to the car, and found a gun pointed at my face.
I grabbed his arm, smashed it into the A post repeatedly. My partner didn’t even know what was going on.
The guy dropped the gun, I told me partner to get it, and I ripped the guy from the car. He’s screaming I broke his arm.
The police get there, I tell them he had a gun and pulled it on me. They grab him and throw him in their car.
He was arrested, taken to the hospital so his arm could be splinted. Was charged with driving impaired and assault. Please guilty and went to jail for a couple of years.”
8. Drugs are bad
“A TINY girl I went to school with was at home with her mother in law. A man came and knocked on the door with some bullshit excuse like his car was broken down or something. He eventually left. Her husband took his truck into the shop that day and came home later. That night, the same man broke into their house thinking it was only the two women home, as no other cars had returned.
Her husband began struggling with the intruder and broke a wooden baseball bat over the guys head. He kept attacking. Mother in law jumps in. Tiny woman ran to the kitchen and got a knife and stabbed the man to death stabbing multiple times. The man was high on PCP or something.”
9. Bad times in Panama
“Granddad was in the Navy stationed in Panama after WWII. One day, he and one of his shipmates were out patrolling or on guard duty or some such when a local kid runs up and says there’s an American in a bar nearby and he’s about to get killed. So my granddad and his comrade follow the kid to the bar and walk in to see an American sailor all cut up, backed into a corner holding a chair over his head, surrounded by a a couple of locals with knives.
Granddad scans the room and sees a pair of Panamanian cops in uniform sitting at a nearby table just watching and laughing. He tells the guys with the knives to back off and one of them turns and lunges at him, so he shoots him in the belly.
Immediately, the cops jump up reaching for their sidearms, but Granddad’s buddy shoots them both right around the same time Granddad shoots the second knife-wielding attacker. So maybe thirty seconds after they walked into the bar, four guys are dead.
They got court-martialed but somehow came out without so much as a discharge. Not sure how or why. I need to get around to seeing if I can find any records on it.
Also, my granddad never met a story he couldn’t embellish, but I have a feeling this one is true. He’d talk about horrific violence he experienced at Iwo Jima till the cows came home, but he did NOT want to talk about Panama.”
10. My God…
“Not me, but my father. Back in the 60s, he was at a small town bar with a friend. The friend was playing pool and won a bunch of money off some guy he’d just met. So the guy goes out to the car, gets a gun and kills my dad’s friend.
Everyone in the bar kind of jumped on the gunman, and my dad kicked/stomped his head with his steel toed work boots. The guy died in the hospital, but my dad was never arrested or charged with anything.
He doesn’t talk about it much. The only reason he told me was because I made a stupid joke about shooting someone and he wanted to teach me why it wasn’t funny.”
11. A scary situation
“Was at party with my best friend (a guy) in a house full of college students that all either lived together/hung out together aged between 22-28, in all about 20 of us. His roommate who’d never really had alcohol in excess got shit faced.
This guy kept hitting on me and not taking social cues of me being not interested. Things turned violent eventually. He said he’d kill my best friend for cock blocking. I pretty much put him in a hold and calmed him down and went to another side of the house. A few minutes later, he comes to find us, but he’s gotten a baseball bat.
My best friend lived there, the guy lived there and I was a house guest. My best friend wound up getting whoever was left at the party in one room and the guy was chasing him around with a baseball bat. The way it turned was when the guy got a hold of my friend, and my friend did his best to restrain him, but this guy was unrelenting. It’s all confusing really, the guy just snapped.
My friend literally had to beat him unconscious because he kept trying to strangle my friend. We were all really scared. By the time the cops got there, the guy’s face was REALLY fucked up and my friend had some broken bones. Self defense is a crazy thing, we were concerned my best friend would go to jail, but he didn’t.
Turned out the roommate was there on an expired visa, and he had two or three priors for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Last we heard he’s still in jail, his face is completely rearranged and banned from entering The United States for ten years. That was 4 years ago.”
12. A story from Queens
“I was living in Queens while attending Fordham U in the Bronx. Came off the train one night, there was a young busker at the end of the platform rapping about how if everyone just gave a little money God would give a little back. I looked straight ahead, ignored him, tried to power walk past him.
I’m a small female, he was a much bigger man. He grabbed me by the arm and started trying to charm me for money. I was pulling away, trying to make him let go, he wouldn’t. I started screaming and then I just started stabbing him with my keys. I always carried my keys with the tips stuck out between my fingers because it was a not so nice neighborhood and I always got home late. It didn’t kill him but it hurt enough that he let me go.
This little immigrant woman had been coming up the platform and heard me screaming so she came running and started hitting him with umbrella. So now he’s on the ground bleeding and being sacked about his personage by a seventy-five year old Ukrainian woman who introduced herself to me as Olga. Police came, arrested him, gave me and my new friend a pat on the back and a ride home.
Fortunately it was the only time I was ever assaulted when I lived in Queens. When I lived near campus in the Bronx it was a lot worse. My roommate was insane.”
13. Bar fight
“When I was 22 I was at a show at a bar, watching my friends band play. After they finished their set I moved to the back to be near the doors to help them with moving their equipment out. It’s very dark and everyone else is still up closer to the stage.
Suddenly, someone I don’t know grabs me from behind, in a big bear hug, and starts to drag me back towards the doors leading out. I, without thinking at all, drop my weight, manage to slip out of his arms, whirl around, grab his hair and SLAM his face down into my rising knee. I can still to this day feel his nose shatter as I hit him. He stumbles backwards, blinded and covered in blood.
He’s rather quickly grabbed by my friends who had seen him attack me and the cops are called. He’s arrested and taken to the hospital, where it turns out I broke not only his nose, but also fractured his cheek bone.
For context I’m a girl, and around 110 lbs. I’ve never been in a fight or have any real idea how to defend myself. I’m certain the only reason this worked is that he hadn’t expected me to defend myself in any way, it was entirely the surprise of it. I don’t think it would have worked at all had he been prepared.”
14. Don’t mess with Texas
“My civics teacher who lived in a smaller Texas town told me a crazy story from his childhood. When he was a kid, a robber broke into his house and was stealing shit from his family. He woke up and looked around the house due the noise. He found the robber standing in his foyer, about to exit, and the next thing he knew, the robber’s head exploded.
His father who was upstairs got a his revolver, shot the robber’s head, who met the hammer of justice if the form of a .44 magnum.
That was that. Robber gone, and no legal consequences faced the family, due to Texas laws concerning protecting your property (this occurred way long ago so laws may be different). He used this story to explain the kinds of laws the U.S and Texas had. Pretty insane story. Moral of the story: If you rob someone, and they have a gun and they know how to use it, prepare to say goodbye to your way of life, or your mortal coil. Especially in Texas.”
15. Nightmares
“3 of them have been car/motorcycle jackings. The one that sticks with me the most is the guy who tried to steal my bike at knife point. I reached into my riding jacket and fired the gun through the holster(and jacket). It’s not like the movies where the bad guys just fall over.
In the time it took emergency services to arrive, I had to watch a grown man writhe in pain, scream, cry, beg for his mom, and ultimately expire.
It is one of the most heartwrenching things I’ve ever seen. I still have nightmares.”
