Crime & Safety

Granny 'Rambo' Fires When Ready. And, Boy, Was She Ready

When two would-be robbers fired at 51-year-old grandmother of four, she emptied the chamber of her gun.

You seriously don’t want to mess with Paris Ainsworth.

There’s a reason the Detroit woman’s siblings now call the grandmother of four “Rambo,” and you don’t want to question the validity of the moniker.

You just don’t.

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Ainsworth slipped the piece into her pocket when she saw the men approaching her as she arrived home late Saturday after working a double shift at her health-care job.

“Don’t pull it,” one of the men warned, she told WDIV.

He shot, putting four bullets in the 51-year-old woman, three of them lodging in her side and the other in her free hand.

She answered back with some choice words and a volley of gunfire, putting a bullet in each leg of one of the men.

"I said, 'You mother (expletive),' and pulled out (my gun) and started shooting,’ ” she said.

Ainsworth waited for EMS to arrive on a neighbor’s porch. The alleged assailants got away, but not for long. 

Detroit police caught up with the pair when they showed up at Sinai-Grace Hospital in west Detroit for treatment of their wounds – curiously enough finding themselves once again at the same place as Ainsworth, who was also being treated  there for her injuries.

Ainsworth applied for the concealed weapons permit two years ago, owns two handguns and trains regularly. Law-abiding citizens need to protect themselves, she said.

"This is ludicrous, the way that they are just robbing and trying to take stuff from people, and killing people," she told WDIV. "He didn't shoot me because he felt that I was going to shoot him. He didn't care. He just shot. He didn't look like, 'Oh my God I shouldn't have.' He just had the devil in him.”

Ainsworth said she owes her life to the fact that she was packing.

"If I wouldn't have had my gun I would be dead today," she told the TV station.

Her sister, Twila Ainsworth, agrees.

"I'm extremely proud of her because she was able to return fire back,” she said. "She had something to protect herself. If she didn't, she would be dead.”


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