The Guard violated several of its own standing orders from the Ohio National Guard OPLAN-2 rules of engagement for riot and crowd control. In fact, the adjutant general of the Guard, Sylvester Del Corso, stated 16 times in testimony before a grand jury that the shootings were not justified.
There was no riot on May 4. According to expert testimony by Ahern, the situation on the campus that day was a “demonstration, not a riot”. He testified that the purpose of crowd control at a peaceful protest is to protect the rights of protestors because “there is a constitutional right to protest and to demonstrate against grievances…”.
I suppose the burning of the ROTC building was done in a peaceful way. Were there 'smores?
Ignoring orders that demonstrations not take place because there is a threat of violence - well, that’s fine too, I guess. Never mind that assembling after being ordered not to by local authority is not a protected right, and never has been.
Kent State was state property, owned by the taxpayers of Ohio and administered by the government. If the administration and the government had banned a demonstration, the students had no right to have one anyway on the property of the college.
The OP asked who was wrong. The National Guard was wrong, certainly, but so were the protest leaders and protesters.
The ROTC building was burned on May 2. The massacre occured two days later on May 4. The order to disperse on that day was improperly given, and was not in accordance with OPLAN-2. The judge in the case, who had been less than charitable to the plaintifs, even instructed the jury that the students were lawfully assembled that day. He even mentioned one victim, Cadet First Sergeant Schroeder, by name to emphasize that these were not rioters but students who “had all the rights and privileges of students and were properly on the campus at the time and place of these tragic events”.
In his autobiography The Brass Ring, editorial cartoonist and WWII veteran Bill Mauldin described training with dummy wooden guns as a National Guard recruit prior to Pearl Harbor. He added that he’d never heard of National Guard troops being given live ammunition until Kent State.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that the shooting was in retaliation for burning down the ROTC building. But it had to have been in the minds of the National Guardsmen, that at least some of the people protesting and throwing rocks at them were capable of violence, including life-threatening violence.
Even if it had turned out that the students were all hiding knives in their backpacks, it wouldn’t explain why someone decided live ammunition was needed for a riot control situation, and for that matter why it was loaded in the rifles. As far as I know, there was no precedent for assuming the protestors would use deadly force.
Probably because many protesters act like children.
Protesters do have a right to peaceably assemble and voice whatver concerns they have (taking into account permits, local ordinances, etc.)
Protesters do NOT have a right to fling stuff at police, trash the local McD’s or Starbucks, or cause any damage to private and public property and the like. That is not ‘protest’, that is anarchy or rioting.
So good it’s impossible. Nobody but the world’s best baseball players could throw ANYTHING that far. In fact, most major league baseball players could not throw a rock 125 yards.
My point is this: This was not as simple as the govt killing 4 innocent straight A students. It was a mess. Plenty of guilt to be passed around. However if I knew that there was trouble on campus, including burning a building, and an armed force shows up I would not sit and read a book ignoring the commotion,unless I was smoking something strong enough to ignore the teargas and make the whole situation funny.
Who said an M1 had a 8 round clip? Is this an expert?
The story of the poor girl about to be bayonetted seems like a stretch.
I would expect all riot police to be armed, else a group would just overrun them at will if the numbers allowed. Now lock and loaded is a different matter. I would question who gave the order to lock and load. I also would like to know the tempature that day at that time. The guard were wearing gas mask which are not a treat even in cool weather.
In summary, this was a tragedy , wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hopefully it has saved lifes since then.
Yup. Let’s make sure not to put to much blame for the shootings on the guys with the guns. If people just did what they were told, nobody would have to have been shot.
Unless standard riot control tactics in the US at the time included live ammunition (and from what I recall, even during the civil rights protests of the 60s, the National Guard didn’t use live ammunition), the protestors had no reason to think that lethal force would be used against them. At the very least, the crowd should have been informed of that (although from what I’ve read it sounds like there was more than one error of judgement made on each side during the days leading up to the shootings).
Students at Jackson State University led a protest against the actions at Kent State, ten days later. They were confronted by a battalion of city and state police, who opened fire, killing two students and wounding twelve others.
You make a good point about state property, Mr. Moto, but the Kent State faculty and the guardsmen both thought, incorrectly, that a state of emergency had been declared, making assembly illegal. This would imply that assembly was legal at all other times.
Or do you mean, they were not studying and they were bad naughty students who deserved to be killed and seriously injured?
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However if I knew that there was trouble on campus, including burning a building, and an armed force shows up I would not sit and read a book ignoring the commotion, unless I was smoking something strong enough to ignore the teargas and make the whole situation funny.
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No you’d probably go and have look, or maybe you’d retreat 750 feet, either way you might still have been shot.
You make the protesters sound like soldiers on the fields of France. What do you think the peace protesters were going to do? Overrun the guards’ positions, throw grenades into their foxholes, shoot them (with rocks), take them POW?
Meaning what? That if its roolly roolly hot and you are uncomfortable, you are allowed to vent your discomfort by shooting your own citizens? What the hell’s your point?
You can wriggle, you can squirm, but in the end, there was no excuse for shooting those people.
