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Notable Russian Roulette Incidents
Do's/Don'ts 
Tags: russian, roulette, deaths, incidents, killed, accidents, game, how to, win, interesting, dead, dumb, cheat
There are numerous reported incidents of Russian Roulette. Many are teenagers, with some players as young as 14. PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!
| | Russian Avant-Garde poet Vladimir Mayakovsky played Russian Roulette with himself on April 14, 1930, and died at 10:15am. In observance of the Russian superstition that before death a man must put on clean linen, he changed his shirt before playing. (cited in The Bedbug and Selected Poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky edited by Patricia Blake et al.) |
| | British author Graham Greene claimed that in his youth he often played Russian Roulette as a means to provide "excitement and get away from the boredom." But he later decided that "it was no more exciting than taking aspirin for a headache." |
| | In his autobiography, Malcolm X says that during his burglary career he once played Russian roulette, pulling the trigger three times in a row to convince his partners in crime that he wasn't afraid to die. In the epilogue to the book, Alex Haley states that Malcolm X revealed to him that he palmed the bullet. |
| | On December 24, 1954 the American blues musician Johnny Ace killed himself in Texas after a gun he pointed at his own head discharged. Many sources, including the Washington Post attribute this to Russian roulette. |
| | John Hinckley, Jr., the man who attempted to murder President Ronald Reagan in 1981, was known to play Russian roulette, alone, on two occasions (although neither time he pulled the trigger was the bullet in the firing chamber). Hinckley also took a picture of himself in 1980 pointing a gun at his head. |
| | In 1999, three Cambodian men all got drunk, and decided to play Russian Roulette with a land mine, each taking turns to stamp on the mine. The three died in a great explosion minutes later. They were later posthumously awarded a Darwin Award. |
| | On June 12, 2001, Clinton Pope, a 16-year-old with a criminal record who had been drinking for the night, fired a bullet into his face while playing Russian roulette before his friends in St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S. He was sent to a hospital and was in critical but stable condition. |
| | PBS claims that William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, had attempted suicide by playing a solo game of Russian roulette. |
| | On October 5, 2003, psychological illusionist Derren Brown played Russian roulette on British television Channel 4. The stunt was broadcast live with a slight delay allowing the program to cut to a black screen if anything had gone wrong. The stunt was condemned by some as being irresponsible, and a statement by the police that they had been informed of the arrangements in advance and were satisfied that "at no time was anyone at risk" made it clear that the incident was at least partially a hoax. However, it was proved on the prerecorded segment of the program that at point blank range even a blank cartridge is potentially lethal, and may cause concussion to the head, deafness or burns. Exactly what precautions Brown took to avoid this are still unknown. |
| | Criss Angel subsequently performed a similar stunt. The section, created for his TV show Mindfreak, was not aired. |
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