Woman Uses Shotgun to Defend Family From Multiple Attackers

A woman in Toledo, Ohio, used a shotgun to fend off two men who police say were fighting a member of her family.

Officers responded to a home on Pinewood Avenue, not far from the city’s downtown, early Tuesday morning, where they found the woman holding a shotgun… and holding two young men at bay. 

Dazeon Hersey, 19, and Juawan Hersey, 21, face multiple charges after police responded to a home on Pinewood where they found a woman holding a shotgun, defending her family from the men. Juawan was living at the home with his girlfriend at the time. 

Units forced entry and placed the men under arrest.

Dazeon faces charges of Domestic Violence, Assault, Obstruction and Resisting Arrest.

Unfortunately, that’s basically all the information that’s been released by Toledo police at this point, so we don’t have much to go on other than the fact that these two guys are facing charges while the armed mom is not. I can’t even find any other local media accounts other than WTVG’s report. 

Honestly, that might be why this incident hasn’t generated much attention. Nobody was killed here. No one was even shot. 

There doesn’t appear to be any dramatic surveillance videos showing the armed mom confronting the men. From what little we know, a woman armed herself with a shotgun when two men were allegedly assaulting a member of her family, kept the situation from getting worse until police arrived, and went on with her life while the two men went to jail.

This is the kind of defensive gun use that’s extraordinarily easy to overlook, but it’s also representative of the vast majority of defensive gun uses. Most of the time the trigger is never pulled, and the presence of the firearm is enough to prevent the situation from escalating any further. It’s still an awfully important event for the armed citizen and those with a gun barrel pointed at them, but it’s not necessarily newsworthy, even from the perspective of local media. 

How many DGU’s take place each year remains the subject of considerable debate, with the CDC acknowledging estimates between 500,000 and 2,500,000 each year. Cases like this illustrate one reason they’re so difficult to count. If nobody fires the gun, nobody is injured, and the armed citizen isn’t arrested, there’s probably not going to be a statistic somewhere labeled “defensive gun use.” 

In this case we do have a single media report, but if WTVG bumped this story in favor of something with better video or had to drop it because the meteorologist went 30 seconds over his allotted time on the evening news, we would never have known about this incident. 

I definitely have a lot of questions about what happened inside that Pinewood Avenue home Tuesday morning, and it’s frustrating to know we probably won’t ever learn the answers. But based on what police have released so far, this appears to be a defensive gun use with the best possible outcome: the alleged attackers were arrested, the intended victims are apparently okay, and the armed citizen never had to pull the trigger.

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