The Kent State shootings basically took the fun out of the
protest movement. Had the military been used earlier, much of
the anti war movement would have never happened. Protests were
being treated as a party. The shooting made folks wake up.

And that is not terrorism. It was a lawful use of force.

Lawful my ass! -- no order to shoot was given, several of
those killed were not part of the demenstration, merely
walking to class and hit by "errant" bullets


Send button stuck? You were wrong in all three posts btw.

OK follows a long cut and paste resulting from a google
search "Kent State 1970" Suggest you read it in detail

http://www.spectacle.org/595/kent.html

Kent State, May 4, 1970: America Kills Its Children
Twenty-five years ago this month, students came out on the
Kent State campus and scores of others to protest the
bombing of Cambodia-- a decision of President Nixon's that
appeared to expand the Vietnam War. Some rocks were thrown,
some windows were broken, and an attempt was made to burn
the ROTC building. Governor James Rhodes sent in the
National Guard.


*******
The units that responded were ill-trained and came right
from riot duty elsewhere; they hadn't had much sleep. The
first day, there was some brutality; the Guard bayonetted
two men, one a disabled veteran, who had cursed or yelled at
them from cars. The following day, May 4th, the Guard,
commanded with an amazing lack of military judgment, marched
down a hill, to a field in the middle of angry
demonstrators, then back up again. Seconds before they would
have passed around the corner of a large building, and out
of sight of the crowd, many of the Guardsmen wheeled and
fired directly into the students, hitting thirteen, killing
four of them, pulling the trigger over and over, for
thirteen seconds. (Count out loud--one Mississippi, two
Mississippi, to see how long this is.) Guardsmen--none of
whom were later punished, civilly, administratively, or
criminally--admitted firing at specific unarmed targets; one
man shot a demonstrator who was giving him the finger. The
closest student shot was fully sixty feet away; all but one
were more than 100 feet away; all but two were more than 200
feet away. One of the dead was 255 feet away; the rest were
300 to 400 feet away. The most distant student shot was more
than 700 feet from the Guardsmen.

Some rocks had been thrown, and some tear gas canisters
fired by the Guard had been hurled back, but (though some of
the Guardsmen certainly must know the truth) no-one has ever
been able to establish why the Guard fired when they were
seconds away from safety around the corner of the building.
None had been injured worse than a minor bruise, no
demonstrators were armed, there was simply nothing
threatening them that justified an armed and murderous
response. In addition to the demonstrators, none of whom was
closer than sixty feet, the campus was full of onlookers and
students on their way to class; two of the four dead fell in
this category. Most Guardsmen later testified that they
turned and fired because everyone else was. There was an
attempt to blame a mysterious sniper, of whom no trace was
ever found; there was no evidence, on the ground, on still
photographs or a film, of a shot fired by anyone but the
Guardsmen. One officer is seen in many of the photographs,
out in front, pointing a pistol; one possibility is that he
fired first, causing the others, ahead of him, to turn and
fire. Or (as some witnesses testified) he or another officer
may have given an order to fire. *****It is indisputable
that the Guardsmen were not in any immediate physical danger
when they fired; the crowd was not pursuing them; they were
seconds away from being out of sight of the demonstration.*****

There was also an undercover FBI informant, Terry Norman,
carrying a gun on the field that day. Though he later turned
his gun into the police, who announced it had not been
fired, later ballistic tests by the FBI showed that it had
been fired since it was last cleaned-- but by then it was
too late to determine whether it had been fired before or on
May 4th.
*******
It would be too charitable to say that the investigation was
botched; there was no investigation. Even the New York City
police, who are themselves prone to brutality and
corruption, do a better job. Every time an officer
discharges his weapon, it is taken from him, and there is an
investigation. Here--to the fatal detriment of the federal
criminal trial which followed--it was never conclusively
established which Guardsmen had fired, or which of them had
shot the wounded and the dead. Since all were wearing gas
masks, it is impossible to identify them in pictures (many
had also removed or covered their name tags, a classic ploy
of law enforcement officers about to commit brutality in the
'60's and '70's), and though many confessed to having fired
their weapons, none admitted to being in the first row and
therefore, among the first to fire. The ballistic evidence
could have helped here, but none was taken.

One rumor has it that the Guardsmen were told the same night
that they would never be prosecuted by the state of Ohio.
And they never were. The Nixon administration stalled for
years, announcing "investigations" that led nowhere; White
House tapes subsequently released show that Nixon thought
demonstrators were bums, asked the Secret Service to go beat
them up, and apparently felt that the Kent State victims had
it coming. As did most of the country; William Gordon calls
the killings "the most popular murders ever committed in the
United States."

The history of the next few years is very sad. A federal
prosecution was finally brought, but the presiding judge is
said to have signalled his preference for the defendants,
guiding their attorney's conduct of the case to help them
avoid legal errors. He dismissed all charges at the close of
the prosecution's case, avoiding the need for a defense and
taking the case away from the jury. Among his reasons: a
failure to prove specific intent to deprive the victims of
their civil rights; due to the lack of any investigation, it
was almost impossible at this late date to show which
Guardsmen shot which victim.

In the New York City police force, which is far from
perfect, officers who have killed or injured someone under
questionable circumstances are often dismissed from the
force even though there is not enough evidence for a
criminal conviction; the standard of proof is not the same
for an administrative action as for a criminal case. You
don't want an unstable, sadistic person on the force, even
though there may not be enough evidence for a criminal
conviction. But the Guardsmen--even the one who confessed to
shooting an unarmed demonstrator giving him the finger--were
not deemed unfit to serve the State, even though they had
fired indiscriminately into a crowd containing many
passsersby and students on their way to classes.

A civil suit brought by the wounded students and the parents
of the dead ones deteriorated among infighting by the
plaintiffs' lawyers. Unable to agree on a single theory of
the case, they contradicted each other. The jury returned a
verdict for the defendants.

This verdict was overturned on appeal--the main ground was
that the judge did not take seriously enough the attempted
coercion of a juror who was assaulted by a stranger
demanding an unspecified verdict--and a retrial was
scheduled. On the eve of it, the exhausted plaintiffs
settled with the state for $675,000.00, which was divided 13
ways. Half of it went to Dean Kahler, the most seriously
wounded survivor, and only $15,000 apiece went to the
families of each of the slain students, a pathetically small
verdict in a day when lives are accounted to be worth in the
many millions of dollars. The state issued a statement of
"regret" which stopped short of an apology for the events of
May 4th, nine years before.

I write this just a week after the Kansas city bombing that
appears to have taken 200 lives (the rescuers are still
searching the wreckage) and the theme today is the same as
25 years ago. Hate was in the air then, as it is today.
Admittedly, the First Amendment protects hate speech,
whether it comes from the most marginal extremist or the
highest public official. Demonizing someone else for their
beliefs or their race, or even calling for their immediate
assassination, is legal in America today and was twenty-five
years ago. But the fact that something is legal to do does
not make it right to do, or relieve the speaker of any moral
responsibility for the consequences.

President Nixon created a public atmosphere in which
students who opposed the war were fair game for those who
supported the government. In the week following Kent State,
construction workers rioted on Wall Street, attacking
antiwar demonstrators and sending many to the hospital, some
permanently crippled. It was reported at the time that, a
day or two after the deaths, President Nixon called the
parents of the only slain student known to be a
bystander--he was a member of ROTC--to express condolences.
The phone never rang in the other parents' houses. The
message couldn't have been clearer: they had it coming.

I was fifteen that year, raised in a very comfortable middle
class environment and very naive. Kent State was my
political education. What I discovered that week, and that
year, was that America in those times was perfectly willing
to harass, beat and kill its own children if they disagreed
with government policy. The step from being a member of the
protected American mainstream to being a marginalized
outsider, not entitled to the protection of law enforcement
and fair prey to any violent, flag-waving bully who happened
to pass, was to stand up and say you did not believe the
Vietnam war was right.

I am not sure that anyone too young to remember those times
can really appreciate what it was like. We know today the
extent to which the FBI was involved in dirty tricks,
illegal wiretapping and burglaries against even moderate
antiwar organizations. Prior to Kent State, I had joined an
organization called Student Mobilization Against the War.
One day, their offices were burglarized and their membership
lists stolen. We had no doubt at the time that it was the
government, and we were right.

I led demonstrations that week outside my high school
protesting the Kent State killings and, afterwards, the
principal summoned me and my father to his office and
threatened to have me expelled as a trouble-maker. My
father--I am very proud of him, as he was not an ideological
man and his opposition to the war was very muted--replied
that if I was expelled, he would fight it "all the way to
the Supreme Court." I had done nothing else than exercise my
First Amendment right of protest. We heard nothing more
about expulsion, but a close friend of mine, who didn't have
an assertive parent to stand up for him, was thrown out of
school.

That week, people came out of the woodwork--wearing black
leather, chains wrapped around their fists, waving American
flags--people we had never before seen in our neighborhoods.
These patriots set up a counterdemonstration across the
street from ours. For hours, a rumor was rampant that they
would attack us and that the police would not
intervene--exactly what had happened on Wall Street a day or
so before. Their cursing and chain-rattling became uglier
until finally they summoned their courage and charged.
Someone shouted "Link arms!" and five or six teenagers, me
among them, joined to interpose our bodies between the
attackers and demonstrators. The Brooklyn police, unlike
those on Wall Street, or the National Guard in Kent days
earlier, did not seek or condone the killing of children.
They ran in and forced the attackers back. I was fifteen
then and am forty now, but I have never had a finer moment
in my life. It was the only moment in my life that I came
close to living up to Gandhi's statement that "we must be
the change we wish to see in the world."

Here are the names of those who died at Kent State, so that
they may not be forgotten:

ALISON KRAUSE

JEFFREY MILLER

SANDRA SCHEUER

WILLIAM SCHROEDER

My source for many of the details in this essay is William
A. Gordon, Four Dead in Ohio (North Ridge Books, 1995.)

Gunner

"At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child -
miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied,
demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless.
Liberalism is a philosphy of sniveling brats." -- P.J. O'Rourke