Four Dead in Ohio

I used to go to Kent State. May 4 was usually in finals week and people went a bit goofy about the shootings. I had several professors that were there during the shootings (one was in the parking lot and hid behind his briefcase) and talked about how shocking it was. The facts are this: there were protests over Nixon bombing Cambodia as part of the Vietnam War, the ROTC building was burned down and the fire department was kept back by protesters so the fire couldn't be put out, there was a riot where businesses were broken into and looted, the Ohio National Guard was pulled out of Akron (there was a Teamsters strike and trucks were being shot at and having rocks dropped from overpasses) and put on campus, there was a protest at the bottom of a hill that turned violent, gas grenades were used, the ONG backed up the hill before turning around and firing started. Four died.

I've heard about the incident from people that were there and I have been on that hill. I also was there at the same time of day as the shooting. From the point of the shooters, there was a dorm on the left side of the parking lot and a few thousand people lived in dorms to their left. Right behind the parking lot is a path for the people in those dorms to get to the classes on the right. Behind that path is an empty field and beyond them are dorms for another few thousand people. In a minute during that time of the day, over an thousand people walk past that parking lot. If you're concentrating on the people in the lot, climb up a small hill and turn around, you're suddenly seeing over a thousand people heading towards you. The hill itself is steep and has a lot of exposed roots; I took that hill once as a shortcut and it wasn't worth climbing it to save three minutes. The shooters were wearing gas masks and holding heavy and bulky rifles. Their visibility would have been poor and their peripheral vision gone. When they turned around, they'd have seen a thousand people and, not knowing the ebb and flow of foot traffic, it would have been a shock. Thirteen seconds of shooting later, four were dead and nine injured.

The shootings weren't justified. Not at all. Not even close. They weren't shooting at people climbing the hill, they shot indiscriminately. Bullets were pulled out of a dorm several hundred yards away and the kids walking to and from their dorms were shot. My guess, from what I heard from witnesses and walking the ground, is that one of the shooters panicked or tripped and fired and all the other ONG thought they were getting shot at and also panicked. We think of National Guard troops as competent and as well-trained as active military. After a decade of two wars in the Middle East, the National Guard is well-trained and know what they are doing. Back in the Vietnam era, however, the National Guard were kids whose parents had money or pull and got them into the Guard so they didn't have to go to Vietnam. They were tired and stressed out from guarding overpasses and then sent to Kent to have thousands of people their own age throw rocks and call them baby killers. They wouldn't have been well-trained in marksmanship or basic gun safety (like not putting your finger on the trigger until you are going to fire). As an Evil Conservative, I hate to say this, but the damnhippies are in the right. The Guard were protected from prosecution and the state and federal governments did their best to sweep it under the rug. Reagan, who was California's governor, gave an angry speech blaming the damnhippies (I can't find the speech on youtube though I'm sure it's in some of the documentaries about this) that was pretty embarrassing if you're a fan of his. It's one of the things that really helped to radicalize the Baby Boomer generation because it was so unfair and wrong and there was no justice.

Kent State, which was not a liberal campus (it was known for its good business school) wasn't over it when I was there twenty years later. A lot of damnhippies went there because the shootings made them think it was a liberal university and that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was there for the first Gulf War (the one where we defended a repressive regime against another repressive regime, not the one where we defeated a repressive regime to create a repressive regime that is a haven for terrorists) and the damnhippies were loud but didn't do a lot of protesting because they were getting high and listening to indie rock and alternative rock. No, really, they were my roomies, I watched them and stepped over their passed-out bodies. I left Kent around the time they finally installed a memorial which was panned a pretty ugly and meaningless (and was next to the architecture school, ironically). Today's generation are more radical by far than mine (during my time at Kent, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed while the Chinese Communists became factory owners oppressing their workers for profit) and are now Occupying city centers and their parents' basements. What a long, strange trip it's been.