Nearly another anniversary of Kent State is upon us and once again I want to remember the heroic Guardsmen who did their duty despite being faced with an unfair set of conditions.
This year is particularly notable as tomorrow marks 35 years since the US sold South Vietnam down the river thanks to Teddy Kennedy. At the same time the actions by Kennedy and his Senate cohorts led to a genocide in Cambodia.
The hippie punks that protested at Kent State have a lot of blood on their hands.
God Bless our troops and their families.
God Bless our troops and their families.
Amen
Judge Bork wrote of this time in America in great detail, in his book 'Slouching Towards Gomorrah' and spoke of how the professors on campuses all over the country, basically 'hid' or even 'joined' the students and refused to get the situation under control.
Thanks again for getting this back up. I learned a great deal regarding the circumstances of this incident.
After all this blather, let’s get down to the facts.
Stang’s article about the May 4, 1970 shooting of 13 students by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University during an anti-war rally is very inaccurate and misleading.
Stang claims there was a sniper that fired at the Guardsmen, but he is simply wrong. First and foremost, I have been to Kent State University and have seen the bullet hole in the metal sculpture that Stang references. The hole is larger on the student side of the sculpture.
This obviously means that the bullet came from the Guard, hit the sculpture and expanded the hole on the way out. Also, his claims that there was a “riot,” and that the students were “surging” up the hill toward the Guardsmen, was completely disproven by photos that were taken. (That was early inaccurate info; Stang was very dishonest in quoting such bogus misinformation.) The students were scattered and at a great distance—typically hundreds of feet away.
(Interestingly, too, Stang had a photo in which he looked through the hole to a building where he claims the sniper was. He couldn’t even get the name of the building right. He said it was Prentice Hall, when the picture actually shows Dunbar Hall.)
Secondly, most of the Guardsmen, didn’t even fire at all! Of the 76 Guardsmen present, only about 23 fired. And of those 23 most of them fired in the air. That is why only seven were indicted.
Thirdly, NONE of the Guardsmen who fired said they shot at a sniper. They actually fired over a broad area. And one Guardsman, Lawrence Shafer, even admitted he shot at a student who gave him “the finger.” (New York Times, Nov. 7, 1974, p. 51)
Fourthly, during the later 1979 civil trial of the Guardsmen, the engineering firm of Bolt, Berenek and Newman was hired to analyze the recording of the shots. They proved conclusively that all shots came from the Guard, contrary to Stang’s claim that the first shot came from a sniper.
It is a shame that the seven Guardsmen were not convicted of manslaughter at the very least.
For the facts in more detail and not Stang’s nonsense, I highly recommend:
The Truth About Kent State by Peter Davies, and The Kent State Coverup by Joseph Kelner and James Munves