Bulletproof: 2

Who needs Kevlar?

Not a woman who was shot during a mah jong game and lived to tell about it.

The tale of derring-do at the mahjong table was revealed in a plea hearing for Shing Man-ping, an illegal immigrant from Hunan province.

[ ... ]

... Shing and an accomplice entered a home in Fanling and attempted to rob the six occupants who were playing mahjong. While his accomplice covered the players, Shing set about tying them up and robbing them one by one. But he ran into trouble when he tried to take a waist bag from one woman, who refused to give it up.

Shing's accomplice then pointed the pistol at the woman, who heard a "bang which to her resembled the sound of a champagne bottle being opened ..."

One of the other players then shouted that the gun was a fake, while another ran to get a cleaver from the kitchen. Shing and his friend ran away, and the group resumed their mahjong game without even calling the police - even though the woman had spotted a hole in her shirt and a red welt on her stomach.

It was not until the following morning that she called the police, after opening her bag and discovering a hole had been blasted through it - and the $12,500 in notes it contained.

Officers searched the room where she and her companions had been playing and turned up a spent 7.62mm casing and a projectile.

A pathologist examined her wound and noted "it would be possible, by chance and by luck", for the bullet's energy to have been so reduced by its passage through her handbag and the banknotes that it left only a superficial wound ...

Not chance. Not luck.

Did I call it, or what?

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