Posted on 05/05/2008 8:17:11 AM PDT by buccaneer81
Speaker: Don't shame Kent State's dead Monday, May 5, 2008 2:58 AM By Jim Mackinnon AKRON BEACON JOURNAL KENT, Ohio -- The shooting deaths 38 years ago of four Kent State University students by the Ohio National Guard need to be seen as a lesson for the United States, a former United Nations weapons inspector said yesterday.
But if the May 4 commemoration continues to be poorly attended -- about 400 people showed up yesterday -- and Americans refuse to read and understand their U.S. Constitution, then those lost lives will have been for nothing, keynote speaker Scott Ritter said.
The retired Marine is a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq and a critic of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. At one point in his career in the 1990s, he sounded alarms about the possibility of hidden weapons in Iraq. He later said the U.S. government had failed to make a case for going to war in Iraq.
Ritter, 46, said in his half-hour talk that he wanted to know why more people didn't turn out yesterday afternoon.
"While I applaud those who are here ... I have to ask, why isn't this hillside covered with the citizens of this country? Where are the students of Kent State? Where are the citizens of this community? Where are the citizens of Ohio?"
The program in which Ritter and others spoke started at noon on the campus commons, near the university's memorial and markers that show where four students were killed and nine were wounded on May 4, 1970, as they protested the Vietnam War and the presence of National Guard troops on campus.
While the commemoration is based on the shootings 38 years ago, many of those attending also were protesting the war in Iraq.
Ritter said that whatever their feelings about the Iraq war, people should never denigrate the Americans fighting there because they are willing to die for us.
"These are men and women who have taken an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic," he said.
"Have we done everything we can to ensure the sacrifice that they are prepared to make is in a cause worthy of the sacrifice?" Ritter said. "And I will tell you, no, we have not."
The students who were killed on May 4 gave the nation the gift of their lives, he said.
"What are we doing to honor this gift? If we cannot understand that their sacrifice screams out for a responsible citizenry, then we have shamed them, shamed them," Ritter said. "The gift that those who died on May 4, 1970, gave us was the gift of self-introspection."
It’s not a popular opinion with some around here, but I think the lesson learned at KSU was don’t throw rocks at people with guns!
Well put - of course you’d have to be dumber than a rock not to know that without being taught.
People don’t show up on Memorial Day to honor our vets either. Why should they show up for this fiasco?
People don’t show up on Memorial Day to honor our vets either. Why should they show up for this fiasco?
LOL! Except the other guy should be ten years old.
You are exactly right. The Ohio Guardsmen were Guilty of horrible aim (I.e. They missed all the rioting Hippy freaks and hit innocent bystanders walking to class.)
No they weren’t. The students that were killed were walking to classes not protesting.
On the afternoon of the event, I was sitting at a Knights of Columbus bar with a bunch of very Democrat tire workers who had just gotten out of work. IIRC, we were watching a Yankee/Red Sox baseball game. When the bulletin as to four dead at Kent State interrupted the game, the guy next to me said: Too bad it wasn't forty. The next guy: four hundred! The next guy: four thousand! And so forth. These were guys working one of the dirtiest jobs in America. Their hands were always grimy with black rubber that attached to their hands at work. They hoped for their kids to go to college and not have to work at tire factories. They were willing to pay tuition. They were not willing to subsidize ignorant rebellions against legitimate authority. They were, even as Democrats, thoroughly fed up with the New Left antics on campus.
Eventually, courtesy of the Demonrats' penchant for surrender to communist enemies, support for street crime, enthusiasm for killing innocent babies, glorification of lavender hoopla posing as "marriage", bizarre social behavior of all sorts, nutcase theories as to practically everything, passion for farming working folks to support the welfare state to assuage the social guilt of the leaders' wives in the corporations which employed them, and several other issues, those tire factory workers would become "Reagan Democrats."
4 killed and 17 wounded at Kent State got part of what the leaders of that mob action and their enthusiastic followers deserved. Weep no crocodile tears for any of them. Better to improve marksmanship training for the National Guard.
That anti-American trash like Scott Ritter goes to Kent State to blubber over the memory of those shot says it all just in case we are EVER inclined to forget the significance of that day.
Redangus: You are right I will always remember where I was when I learned that some justice was done on that field at Kent State,.
Most of the "students" at that "protest" were not students at Kent State; they were professionally organized thugs brought there by SDA.
Remember that SDS was actually funded by a wing of the American Communist Party.
But still, the blood is on the hands of the rioting hippies.
Of the four who were killed, two did not participate in the protest. One was on her way to class and another was an ROTC member.
I don't know about the Ohio NG but the Mass NG was filled with draft dodgers who shouldn't have been issued weapons, I was just back from VN at the time.
Redangus: You are right I will always remember where I was when I learned that some justice was done on that field at Kent State,".
I'm not sure you would feel the same way if your son or daughter was shot and killed while innocently going to class and not being a part of the demonstrations at all.
That is what happened, you know.
I agree with that. The violence of the protestors started the whole thing.
“They were mostly small town college kids who allowed themselves to get riled up by some antiwar professionals.... Protesting was a fun way to let off steam in the Spring time when know one was getting hurt, it was viewed very differently after May 4.”
Thank you for your inside view - and it looks like you know your history as well. I think the National Guard building was torched by the “professional” antiwar folks along with some of the buildings downtown as I recall from my reading of events years ago.
Two of the four killed were students going about their legitimate business a considerable distance away from and not taking part in any demonstrations.
They had no reasonable expectation of survival?
Why not?
Based on your 'reasoning', what reasonable expectation of survival do you have when you sit safely at your computer and post drivel.
They deserved more than being arrested.
Ok, so you think it is ok for people to riot. You had a National Guard unit that was trying to restore order, you had people throwing cement chunks at the guard who were much closer than sixy feet away originally, the guard turned around, at orders from the officer in charge, and was moving off when one of the members(and this was when they were 60+ feet away)turned and fired, the rest fired also because they didn't know what was happening. The officer in charge did good in stopping this, but the ultimate blame lies with the protesters, not the guard. Anyone who thinks they would have stood their ground and not fired at these communist idiots doesn't know what it is like to be in a situation like this. Don't want to get shot? Don't break the law and don't throw cement chunks at armed men. As far as the distances are concerned they were taken after the fact and are open to doubt because the left wing were in charge at that time as they are now on most colleges and Universities.
The students that were killed were not imune from the NG. Were they too stupid to realize that they could not walk across a battlefield without risk of injury??? Even if they were innocent bystanders, anyone NOT part of the demonstrations should have stayed out of the area. Bullets don’t choose sides.
As far as the distances are concerned they were taken after the fact and are open to doubt because the left wing were in charge at that time as they are now on most colleges and Universities.
Are you saying that the investigations of the incident were conducted by students and professors? LOL Stupid statement.
Assume, as I do not, that you were correct and that those shot had nothing to do with the protest (rank baloney!). We live in an age where no one wants to take responsibility for their individual actions. If someone set off a string of salutes in the crowd, the Ohio National Guardsmen would reasonably conclude that they were being fired upon. Those guardsmen were at Kent State after spending a month or more patrolling highway overpasses on Ohio's interstates because of a Teamster strike that included snipers shooting tractor trailer drivers defying the strike. The guardsmen expected to be going back to their jobs, their businesses and their families but were delayed by the Americong punks at Kent State who burned the ROTC building and marched against the drawn weapons of the guard. They should have fired directly into the leading ranks of the leftist punks and anarchists. We ought not castrate the guard in order to protect the curiosity seekers or participants as the case may have been.
I expect to survive when I stay home and mind my own business as I should. I witnessed the Black Panther murder protests by the New Left on the New Haven Green in 1969 or 1970. I sat on the steps of one of the Center Church on the New Haven Green so that I would not have to depend on CBS and other MSM lies as to the the goings on in my hometown. I made a conscious decision to be there. If I had been shot, then I would have had no one to blame but me. I was not at all sympathetic to the demonstrators.
On the same day as Kent State, there was a far worse incident at a black state college in Mississippi called Jackson State. There more students were machine-gunned in their dormitories by a guard unit than were shot at Kent State. At Jackson State, there was no attack on the guard.
Our mush-headed middle class, wanting always to excuse the depredations of improperly raised little "revolutionary" Muffy and Skipper, will not only lie to protect their posthumous reputations and attack guardsmen for doing their job but keep up the drumbeat of lies nearly forty years later. If the story line of the Kent State "martyrs" were not lies, what was Scott the Predator Ritter doing there to mouth the party line of the anti-Americans???
If you hallucinate that at least two of those killed were "going about their legitimate business," what is your source? John Kerry? Bernardine Dohrn? Hussein Obama? Crusty the Pantsuit? The establishmentarian Scranton Report? James Michener (Quaker leftist as well as imaginative novelist)? New York Times editorials? CSNBCABCCNNNYTWaPo?????
When rifles are fired in self-defense by guardsmen, 60 feet is no protection. 6 more inches and it would be the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate. Bullets travel a lot faster than thrown baseballs. If someone was going to die, better the radical punks than the guard.
If you would like to view the dead punks as conservative heroes of some sort, NO SALE!
If your hoof is as soft as your head and your heart, then get physical hoof therapy before risking injury by walking. If you don't like what I posted, then remember that it was not as though I cared.
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