Posted on 05/04/2014 7:40:43 PM PDT by PaulCruz2016
KENT, Ohio - A large crowd gathered just after 11 p.m. Saturday behind the Taylor Hall at Kent State University to honor the fallen. The crowd stood near the Victory Bell holding candles in remembrance of May 4th, 1970.
It was 44 years ago that four students were killed after 67 shots were fired in 13 seconds by the National Guard.
The students were pushed over to the parking lot of Prentice Hall as they were protesting the Vietnam War.
Students and volunteers are still standing in the parking lot area where the four students died. The students will stand there for 12 hours honoring the victims in the very spot where they were shot and killed.
Around 7 p.m. Saturday, a forum was held where survivors answered questions and spoke about the day they will never forget.
"To me, May 4th means life, but it also means death and murder," said Dean Kahler, who was shot and will never walk again.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsnet5.com ...
They deserved getting shot. I doubt I will find any politician or reporter who will agree with me but they were running wild destroying property and hurling stones, bricks etc.
Someone needed to stop them even with deadly force.
Just thought some would find that interesting for historical purposes. Don't know who the middle-age guy is in the foreground. Kind of looks like Albert Grossman - Bob Dylan's manager. I like all this history but damn, didn't anybody carry color cameras on that day? It's 1970 after all.
What a stupid statement.
You can argue about whether or not Kent State was bad, but what does Waco have to do with it?
Is it a contest?
Or does the Left get One Free Pass at Waco because the Right killed students at Kent State?
No soldiers and Obama’s sleeping,
We’re always on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Benghazi-O.
Gotta get down to it
Al Qaeda is cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew them
And found them dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Gotta get down to it
Al Qaeda is cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew them?
And found them dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
No soldiers and Obama’s sleeping,
We’re always on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Benghazi-O.
Can you guess which age group most supported the war, and which was most against it?
I wasn’t there but from what I read about it, two of those who were killed weren’t even at the demonstration but were in a parking lot that happened to be in the line of fire. Why the campus was carrying on as if it was business as usual, I don’t know. In the aftermath Governor Reagan closed all the public universities in California for several days.
Demonstrations did not end entirely. I was at the University of Kentucky after Kent State. There were large street demonstrations, marches. The ROTC building was burned to the ground and the governor shutdown the campus with the National Guard arriving in personnel carriers, apparently well armed. The next few days there were sporadic demonstrations, somewhat quelled by tear gas.
Only later was it revealed that a disgruntled employee had taken the opportunity to torch the ROTC building, an event totally unrelated to the demonstrations.
I had not taken part in the demonstrations but I did after the Guard arrived as some of them had threatened to shoot one of my classmates, a girl trying to get to class, who did not know the campus was shutdown.
Raw goverment power against unarmed civilians.
I was saddened but not shocked by Waco because I’d lived through Kent State.
This was unfortunate, and at worst a result of things going wrong, Waco was a mass massacre of innocents, that was formally dealt out with planning and preparation, and ruthless execution, yet with no explanation, it appeared to be a message massacre.
Because no one ever expected the military to start gunning them down.
Correct.
I was 16 at the time. I’ve read a bit on the event just like a lot of people.
I do know that many of the protesters were throwing bottles, bricks and rail spikes at the guardsmen.
Sooner or later, something was going to happen. There were some innocent bystanders that were killed, but how can the protesters escape at least some or most of the blame along with the National guardsmen for creating this situation?
I also remember that every left leaning idiot used the Kent State shootings as examples of American oppression - from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, to Life Magazine, to every talking head at the time.
A lot of working Americans, whom Nixon dubbed the “silent majority”, were not that upset because after the years of riots in the streets from 1967 to the 1968 Democrat Convention riots to Kent State, it seemed like traditional authority was unable or unwilling to deal with these so-called revolutionaries - who were nothing but Marxist/Communist instigators (Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, etc.).
The SDS and the Weathermen and other Marxist groups were absolutely jubilant after the shootings because they thought this would be the impetus to the “revolution” by the “people”.
So, my impression was that this whole thing was what the left wanted to happen as a propaganda event. Just as the left wants to use every gun related killing as justification for taking firearms away from American citizens.
Anyway, that was my memory of the event.
The National Guard of the time were nice, once when I was in a federal detainment camp with about 3,000 people who weren’t being fed or issued blankets for the days we were there, the Guard, who were supplying the bulk of the guards, fed us a tiny meal, I think a small hamburger, and the rumor was that they had raised the funds for us themselves, since no one else was going to give us anything and we hadn’t eaten since we had been scooped up, days before.
***Mary Vecchio kneeling by the dead student. ***
According to an article years ago, she later became a prostitute.
This event slowed things down enough that the 1960s were clearly ending, since the adventure of the 60s was wrapping up, I adventured some more, won my permanent draft deferment in mid 1971, and then enlisted in the Army a few months later.
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