Want To Be a Real Superhero?

Have you ever dreamed of being a crime-fighting vigilante? I have thought about, and not just as a tyke wearing a bath towel as a cape. The comic books and the movies make it seem possible for average folks to suit up and kick butt alongside the superhumans and their assorted rogues, and since superpowers are the domain of fiction it should be even easier for mere mortals than it is in the comics. In reality though, it is much, much more difficult than you might imagine. Here’s why:

PRICETAG

Superman doesn’t need any weapons because he is the weapon. Affording an apartment in Manhattan may be above his journalist paygrade, but the actual act of thwarting the thugs doesn’t cost him a thing. For us ordinary beings, it would be prohibitively expensive to do that on a daily - or nightly - basis. Tony Stark, Oliver Queen, and Bruce Wayne are independently wealthy so they can easily bankroll their alter-ego personas with all the fancy gadgets they need to get the job done. Assuming that you aren’t a trust fund legacy billionaire, you probably are going to need to go the route of Frank Castle (the Punisher) in order to carve out a niche in the vigilante game. You need weapons. As it turns out though, weapons and ammunition do not come cheap in the real world. Unless your butler has a stache of high powered rifles that he’s willing to loan you, guns are going to be a huge inconvenience for the start-up hero. If you are intent on obeying the law while you’re breaking other laws, the paper trail of your firearm background checks is going to be a constant threat to your anonymity. The black market would save you the federal scrutiny, but it’s still going to be an exorbitant drain on finances and it lands you squarely among the criminal hord you were supposedly trying to bring to pseudo-justice. The other option, of course, is to eschew the firearms and rely on swords and grappling hooks. You will save some funds that way, but if the lowlife scum you’re up against in a back alley is not as frugal as you are, you may be hopelessly outgunned. Additionally, kevlar suits, helmets, boots, gloves, and a lawyer on retainer are going to be necessary tools of the trade.

LEGAL ISSUES

Law enforcement officers regularly need search warrants in order to enter a building or vehicle, otherwise any evidence they find will risk not being admissible in court. If that evidence is acquired from a civilian source such as a private detective, then it can still be used by prosecutors because it wasn’t directly obtained by law enforcement...probably. If you become a vigilante and you decide to provide Five-O with ill-gotten clues, you may very well bring down a criminal, or you might create a ‘chain-of-command’ nightmare that allows that fellon to go free. Either way, the police are probably going to suspect that you broke into a building or vehicle to get that evidence, which is illegal. It’s called breaking and entering. No matter what your intentions were, busting in on some jerk’s condo to find the smoking gun might just land you in cuffs. Speaking of, many of the things that a crime fighter might do in the course of his or her duties are also prone to place one behind bars. Besides assault, the hero could scoop up charges of false imprisonment, trespassing, obstruction of justice, reckless endangerment, and fleeing from the scene of a crime. If you turned your Honda into the hero-mobile, there is a lengthy list of vehicular charges that you could rack up in a hurry. Without years of ninja assassin training in how to vanish into the darkness, your days busting the heads of the criminals may be few, unless you count all of the criminals in the prison with you.

PHYSICAL INSULTS

Without the health advantages of a spider bite, you would have to rely on your own brute strength to get by on the mean streets of wherever your Gotham would be. Whatever weapon you choose to wield, the bad guys will probably be seasoned brawlers who bring their own deadly weapons with them. Because they are criminals already, they won’t be afraid to punch and shoot their way out of trouble. That self defense class you took at the community center during your sophomore year isn’t going to be enough. You may get lucky here and there, but you are generally going to be up against multiple superior fighters with multiple weapons and all the motivation in the world to kick your sorry...backside. Even if your sensei trained you well enough to walk on fiery coals in your bare feet and bisect large pieces of wood with your noggin, injuries are going to happen. MMA athletes can’t fight every night, professional football players can’t play ball more than once a week, and the newbie in the unitard can’t keep up a daily routine of poundings for very long. For starters, the unitard is going to get torn. The other problems with this lifestyle are that it can easily lead to broken bones, torn ligaments, deep lacerations, severe bruising, organ damage, retinal degradation, swelling, exhaustion, internal bleeding, and head trauma. Concussions are serious, and repeated concussions can cause permanent brain injuries that dampen problem solving faculties, decision making, temperament, and memory. Basically, if you manage to survive occupational crime fighting more than a few months without the other long term effects listed above, you’re still probably going to wind up with the mental capabilities of chopped lettuce. The human brain is not designed to be bludgeoned over and over, particularly if it isn’t given sufficient rest in between beatings.

LOGISTICS

Any decent size city has a representative amount of police officers and detectives, who are in turn supported by federal departments such as the ATF and the FBI. With all of those bodies spread out all over the city, crime still happens. There usually isn’t even any hand-to-hand combat once the police arrive on-scene because the crime already happened and the villain has fled to whereabouts unknown. Enter the lone amateur hero in spandex (or faux leather depending on preference). Odds are that the big bad isn’t going to be someone you just happen to know, they aren’t going to tell you their plan upfront, they aren’t going to blab into a hidden microphone exactly where and when they are planning to commit their crime, and they probably will be many blocks away from you when they go ahead with their scheme. If you were close by, they’d probably just wait until you moved on before hatching the crime of the week. Crime fighting is a misleading phrase because it implies a lot of preventive action, whereas law enforcement personnel are often left in a responsive role after the fact. No matter how many steps a city takes to make their municipality safer, the fact remains that too many crimes are opportunistic and random, and the ones that have been thought out in advance have been designed to happen when the long arm of the law is long-arming somewhere else. A lone warrior will find it nearly impossible to be at the right place at the right time to catch a crook. They won’t have access to the kind of information and evidence that they would need to solve a crime unless they have an informant on the force who is high enough up the food chain to provide such comprehensive intel, or they break the law by hacking into a database for said intelligence. There are certainly hotspots for illegal doings that the lone wolf could prowl. That will break up a fist fight once in a while, but it’s not likely to bring down the syndicate. You would still be frequently injured in the course of your calling, but it would be in the course of preventing an ounce of cocaine from being sold, a johnny boy hooking up with a lady, or a misdemeanor assault, instead of saving the world from a parade balloon filled with noxious fumes. Small crimes aren’t small to the people who are victims of small crimes. By stopping that cocaine deal, you’d be inconveniencing the dealer for several minutes! Hey, it all adds up.

Okay, the life of a real caped hero might not be all that easy to pull off and certainly would have drawbacks. The good news for mortal men is that the police and the FBI can usually handle the super villains without our help, and even the ones that might be too much trouble for them can usually be dealt with by the military. The actions of the homemade hero can be left to fiction, giving the rest of us the time to just be kind and watch out for one another.