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Swordsman holds off home invader
In Memphis, a home invasion robbery ends when one of the victims draws a sword and lops off the attacker's trigger finger. He'd been beaten unconscious, but awakened, found the sword (apparently used for yard work, altho one might suspect since it was under the couch, doubling as a home defense tool), and slashed away.
There was no difficulty identifying the robber, since police just fingerprinted the finger. He served eight years for home robberies, only being released from prison last year.
I suppose now we'll have to say "never bring a blade to a gunfight -- unless you can nail the other guy's trigger finger with the first slash."
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Awesome.
The sword used
It's not easy to tell, but from the photograph accompanying the story I think the sword is one of those ulta-cheap brass hilted cruciform 'fantasy' swords made in Pakistan. I always thought they were junk, but if they can stand up to 'yardwork' and still take an edge sharp enough to chop off a finger they can't be that bad!
Reminds me of an amusing story.
I went down to a buddy's house, to help him prep it for sale. One of the side gardens was completely overgrown with weeds, some of them 8 feet tall and 2 inches thick.
Being a hot day, I took my shirt off, and tied on a sweatband, before pulling my yardwork katana out of my trunk. As I stood there contemplating which corner to attack first, the nieghbor came out of his side door with a bag of trash and noticed the half naked, portly stranger with a sword standing about 20 feet away.
Without blinking an eye, he stepped back into his house, still holding his trash, closed and locked his door, and peered out at me through the window. If his eyes were any wider, they'd have fallen out of his face.
I smiled, waved, and proceeded to chop down the nearest large weed.
Thus reassured, he came out, ditched his trash, and we had a friendly chat, starting with an apology from me for scaring him.
There was a recent (this past summer) event where a gang of four teen thugs broke into a guy's apartment in South Minneapolis. It made headlines.
There were two men in the apartment and they were being held at gunpoint. One of the thugs went into a back room and came out with a samurai sword (a souvenir of the apartment renter's). The gun wielding thug started waving the gun in the faces of the two victims. The visiting victim grabbed the sword's hilt and pulled it from the sheath while one thug still held it and started hacking legs and stabbing chests. Another thug gots some fingers chopped off. The gang fled leaving a bloody trail through the apartment halls and down sidewalks.
The police identified the gang at the regional hospital from the stab and chopping wounds, as well as the lost fingers.
Sounds like the Memphis case wasn't so much a sword as a machete.