The authorities are charging the man, who they said had two pistols and a Taser on him but did not draw his weapons, with misdemeanor assault.
Page A2From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 7 September 2026
Man carrying two pistols and a Taser who charged through crowd toward Ohio governor candidate is charged with misdemeanor
As it ran on the front
I want to tell you about the toll plaza on 76, and I promise it gets to Ohio.
There's a scanner over every lane out there that reads your transponder and sorts you into a class before your car's even cleared the gantry — two axles, five axles, whatever you're declared as — and that's the toll you pay. Not what's strapped to the roof rack. Not what's riding in the bed. My wife's brother hauled a wood chipper through that plaza for six months on a two-axle rate because the sensor was never built to look past the first two wheels. Nobody at the plaza is lying to you, exactly. The machine just wasn't given a lane for the whole vehicle, only the part it was told to count. I think about that scanner more than a grown man should. I thought about it again this week, reading about a man in Ohio.…
…(cont) Here's what I've got, and I'm working off three separate wire pieces, so bear with me. The New York Times says the man had two pistols and a Taser on him, and that the authorities say he did not draw either weapon. That's one. Mahoning County Sheriff Jerry Greene told CBS the man "aggressively shoved his way through the crowd" toward Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor. That's two. Fox News, filing the night before those other two ran, has the same man knocking fairgoers over forcing his way toward her at the Canfield Fair — Fox is the one that names the fair, nobody else does, so I want to credit that to them specifically and not spread it around. That's three.
So: two pistols, a Taser, a crowd shoved through, people knocked down, closing on a man's — a candidate's — position at a county fair. And the charge that came back, per the Times, is misdemeanor assault.
Misdemeanor. I keep landing on that word and I'm sorry, I know it's just one word pulled off a wire dispatch, but a toll scanner reads the axles it's built to read, and I think a charge sheet might work the same way. Does it weigh what a man was carrying, or only what his hands did once he got there? I've gone through everything in front of me and I can't find where those two facts — the arsenal and the misdemeanor — sit in the same sentence anywhere. They're in the same weekend. Are they in the same paragraph? Not that I can find.
I had the garage door up when I was reading this, fan belt trouble again, don't ask, and I kept thinking about that gantry — how the thing you're carrying and the thing you're charged for don't have to agree with each other, and nobody has to explain why not.
Oh — one more thing, hold on, before you go. There's a line that ran with this story, and I wrote it down because I liked the phrasing: "this kind of violence has no place in Ohio." I went back through everything I've got to find who said it. It isn't signed. No name sits next to it in anything I've read. So let me ask you the only question I've got left, because I think you can answer it from what's already on the page: who's willing to put their name on that sentence, next to the one that already has a name attached — misdemeanor?
“You show up carrying two pistols and a Taser and you shove your way through a crowd at a guy running for governor of Ohio, and the paperwork that comes back says misdemeanor? That's the word you get for peeing behind a dumpster. The sheriff's own quote — "aggressively shoved his way through the crowd" — is sitting right next to that charge in the same wire story, and somebody still typed "misdemeanor" with a straight face.”
“Look, the officers on scene made a judgment call based on what actually happened, and what actually happened is he never drew either weapon — that's restraint, that's — wait, am I giving him credit for the guns he didn't pull? That's not — that's not what I meant to say. The statute charges conduct, not inventory, that's just how misdemeanor assault works, it's not a comment on the pistols, it's really not, why do I keep bringing up the pistols.”
The receipts
The suspect "aggressively shoved his way through the crowd" toward Amy Acton, Mahoning County Sheriff Jerry Greene told CBS News.
Amy Acton's campaign says the Ohio governor candidate was targeted by an armed individual at the Canfield Fair as political violence fears mount.
‘This kind of violence has no place in Ohio’
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.