A related legend (I assume?) is one about the old Japanese man in an Okinawan bar running into a bunch of U.S. Marine rowdies. I believe this UL is/was told often in the military.
The story is that the local authorities gave this old man – a kung fu expert, natch – a card that he was obliged to present in the case of an altercation. The card’s writing is in Japanese, and explains how so-and-so has achieved such-and-such level of kung fu training.
Anyhoo … supposedly the Marine toughs in a bar were giving the old man a hard time. The old man wants to fight back, but presents the card instead. The Marines laugh, and one of them knocks the card out of the old man’s hand. The old man bends down, picks up the card, and presents it twice more, with the same result. After the third presentation, the old man handily cleans out the barroom all by his lonesome with his mad kung fu skillz.
It’s always mentioned that local law required the old man to present the card three times to a potential opponent … but that after that, he was free to kick arse with no fear of arrest.
Handcuffing anyone trained in a leg-intensive art such as Tae Kwon Do or Thai kickboxing is a fool’s errand. If they wanted to truly restrain him, leg irons would have been necessary, too…
We actually tried to do a Staff Report on this a while back. The closest we came was that the origin was a joke, but we couldn’t track the exact situation so gave up. Imagine some total nebbish, like a young Woody Allen, being accosted by some ruffian, taking up a karate stand and saying, “Stand back! My hands are registered as lethal weapons!” We were pretty confident that was the origin of the urban legend, but we couldn’t nail it more than that.
It’s still sitting in the pile of things to finish up someday, if someone would like to take up the search.
It makes for a neat Catch-22. If your hands are lethal weapons, how do you take them into a public building (presumably with a statute preventing the carrying of weapons therein) to register them?
“Thank for complying with Law A, we must now arrest you for breaking Law B.”
I’ve heard this canard repeated, by of all people, Max Kellerman.
Richard Grant had just upset James “The Harlem Hammer” Butler with a unanimous decision. (If you want to see it, search for “Richard Grant” on youtube. It’s possibly nsfw, so I won’t link it here.)
Butler walks over and cold-cocks Grant. He’s out cold.
Kellerman, in a subsequent broadcast mentions “If fighters still had to register their hands, as they once did, Butler could have been charged with attempted murder.”
The irony:
Max’s brother Sam was later murdered. The confessed killer: James “The Harlem Hammer Butler.” But not with his hands. The murder weapon: Well, he lived up to his name. A hammer.
I disagree with that. Any well trained martial artist will first attempt to disable their attacker using pressure points, which are abso-frickin-lutely wonderful for this sort of stuff. Knowing martial arts does not give you any kind of arcane knowledge of how to kill someone with your pinky finger. It simply gives you a better knowledge of the human body and what works to disable it, plus the physical skills to better implement that knowledge and the confidence to better keep your head in a stress situation.
However, if the attacker has a weapon of any kind, all bets are off because you are now in a deadly force situation, and can use deadly force to defend yourself if necessary.
Just out of curiousity, how old was your ex-roommate?
The claim of 9th Degree sounds a little fishy to me. That’s grand master level level, and you’re looking at probably 40-50 years of training to obtain it. Unless, of course, it’s in a McDojo style where your promotional exam is writing a check and you pass the exam when the check clears the bank.
