Speaker: Don't shame Kent State's dead (UN Punk Scott Ritter)

Ok, so you think it is ok for people to riot.

No, you think it's OK to kill passers by. If they wanted to kill rioters they should have started shooting where the trouble got started, not chase them to another part of campus where there were people who had no idea what was going on then start shooting.

There was some rioting and burning in town the night before, similar to what you see after a national championship win, that is the reason the NG was called in. Antiwar pros + college kids at the end of a school year + too much adult beverages made for a rough night.

As for living the history, like I said I was a college freshman on a campus a few hundred miles away and very similar in demographics to KSU. The same people had been on our campus a couple of days earlier. If thing had been a little different we could all be talking about the shootings at Ball State rather than Kent State, and the dead students could have been me, my late wife or one of our friends. I had to hold my tongue many times that summer when insensitive idiots talked about how the NG should have just killed all the protester to teach those snooty college kids a lesson.

“The punks who were killed were effectively playing in the highway at the very least.” Actually they were just kids going to class that happened to be in the way of errant bullets shot wildly by young, scared National Guardsmen.

“They were more likely active sympathizers” Again in actuality the weren’t even involved in the demonstration just going to class.

“The ROTC building at Kent State was burned the night before.” Most likely not by students at KSU and definitely not by the four student killed.

“That realization put an end to the campus revolution.” I will give you this one. Protesting had become a regular campus activity at many colleges. The death of these four students changed that.

And I fought that crap you’re buddies at the KofC hall were spouting all summer. Idiots saying they should have killed them all. That was a common attitude among townies. My dad and my friends dads were all factory workers and WWII vets, and while they were fed up with the campus protests they were all incensed by the shooting at Kent State. They were smart enough to understand that those four kids could have been their kid just minding their own business and walking to class. Attitudes like your friends are those of people who don’t think much about what they say they just throw out platitudes “like kill them all and let G*d sort it out”.

I guess we both remember where we were on May 4th 1970, but I guess that is where our memories take very divergent path. You seem to remember it as a glorious day in American history whereas I remember it as the day an American military unit opened fire on students exercising their constitutional right to protest. I did not agree with their stance on the war, agree order needed to be restored to the town and campus, but will always feel that opening fire with M-16s on unarmed protesters could not possibly have been the best course of action, but definitely the one the antiwar crowd was hoping for.

And how far does a stray M-16 bullet travel and why would the students walking to class have had an expectation of being shot?

Putting two and two together I bet the reporter knowing what would happen fired his pistol in the direction of the Guardsmen and bang he had one hell of a story.

I'll bet it was Dan Rather. Does anyone know where he was that day?

You want to defend the anti-American leftist trash, feel free. The guardsmen risked their lives defending you and had no obligation whatsoever to put up with revolutionary jackasses who charged them. The guardsmen SHOULD have opened up on the main crowd.

Basic rules for use of guns: 1) Don't pull your gun unless you intend to use it. 2) Don't use your gun to fire "warning shots" but only to shoot those who need shooting. 3) Don't use a gun to wound or at all unless you intend to kill. 4) Use your gun to kill perps who deserve killing. Summary: Unless the situation calls for the killing of the perp, keep your gun out of action. At Kent State, plenty of the punks deserved to be killed and maybe every last one of those on the field. Rushing guardsmen whose rifles are raised is and ought to be suicide. Likewise participating in a mob action including heaving chunks of concrete at the guardsmen. It is not "free speech." Look up speech in the dictionary and show me where it includes rushing armed guardsmen or bombarding them with hurled chunks of concrete in defiance of their legitimate authority in the immediate aftermath of the burning of the campus ROTC building.

BTW, I am still waiting for you to whine about something not at Kent State: the machine-gunning of actually innocent students in their dormitories at Jackson State on the same day. Maybe they were not middle class enough like comrades Muffy and Skipper.

If any kid of mine commits suicide by cop or suicide by National Guard in circumstances like Kent State, it will not be because they were brought up by parents tolerant of such suicidal behavior. That your father loved you enough to abandon common sense, common decency, and necessary community standards to indulge the attitudes you still hold because poor delusioned little boodgeums might be justly shot making a dangerous fool of himself does not mean that our society has no right through its guard to defend itself. It is NOT all about you. It is NOT all about the dead radicals at Kent State or the maimed ones for that matter.

I don't suppose that you were there when the punks were shot. It was a mediocre day not a glorious one. The toll was far too low. The noble slogan of the Airborne: Kill 'em all. Let God sort 'em out" originated with St. Dominic's advice to a general in a war against the Albigensians when a town of Catholics AND Albigensians refused to surrender. When St. Dominic was asked what the Catholic army should do since the population was mixed, he replied in the original form: "Kill them all. God will know His own."

The townies and my Knights of Columbus brothers and the guardsmen were right. Your dad and your friends' dads were wrong to the extent that you accurately portray them. What made your dad and those other factory-worker WWII veteran dads different from the rest of the townies other than needless, witless and dangerous tolerance for adolescent knee-jerk stupidity and rebellion and/or half vast Marxist sympathies???

If the antiwar crowd was hoping for the guardsmen to shoot the punks, then that must be the only time that I would ever have agreed with them. I am glad they got what they wanted and, again, I note that nowhere in this country have they pulled that crap since May 4, 1970. I hope that the Americong were as happy with the result as I always have been. The lesson was that the grownups were in charge whether the student punks' ids were offended or not and that there are deadly consequences to deadly games.

Teach your children to speak Arabic and to autocite the Koran. They will need to do both if your views should ever, God forbid, prevail.

Our memories are quite different. My memory is as to television coverage.

If the Jackson State students acted as you indicate and were so acting when shot (as were the Kent State punks), then marksmanship awards for the shooters there. If you are correct, then Jackson State was worse because of the lesser body count.

1. There is no incontrovertible right to revolution without consequences.

2. The government has the right, indeed the responsibility, to thwart revolutions.

3. Those who revolt and lose are generally dead when it is over. The Brits would have hanged George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson if the Brits had prevailed. Our revolution of 1776 was won and they were not hanged.

4. At various points in American history: Haymarket Square riots, "Bonus Army" encampments in DC disbursed and dispatched by MacArthur and Patton, Kent State (for three examples), Marxist punks rebelled and were killed. Kent State was a very low efficiency response under the circumstances.

In any event, whatever happened at Jackson State does not excuse the rebellious and treasonous criminal punks at Kent State.

OK, it was police who did the shooting. That was after, according to the FBI investigation cited in your linked article, bricks were thrown at the police by students of Jackson State and an officer was inured by debris thrown by a student, after which police armed with shotguns and other firearms INCLUDING machine guns fired (according to the FBI) 460 shots at a five story dormitory. Two students were killed and five or so injured. Two suicides by cop and five failed attempts.

Differences: It was police and not National Guard (distinction without a difference as to justification) and the gunfire was justified for the same reasons it was justified at Kent State.

See #55 and #68.

I have the same attitude because I was right then and because I am right now. Those who make apologies for the dead trash at Kent State ought not to be offended when called what they are. As a matter of fact, I did not drink booze then and I do not drink booze now. The tire factory workers had just gotten to the bar when the bulletin was broadcast and they witnessed live coverage (i.e. "the facts").

It is no surprise that you will not answer straightforward questions when you are a mouthpiece twisting history in service to the suicided anti-American trash (just like Scott Ritter/what a surprise!).

When Al Qaeda Scottie is not trying to entice 14-year olds over the internet, he is out there defending a previous generation of treasonous weasels. Or do you imagine Scottie as a misunderstood patriot exercising mere free speech???

Answer the questions in #40 as well as the one posed in #42.

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.

It's very sad how the next generation rewrites history without knowing anything about it.

The other day I heard some doofus woman commentator referring to the Chicago Convention riots of 1968 as "those student riots."

Anyone who was alive in 1968 knows full-well those were police riots for which Daley had to apologize big time. It took the city a decade to recover from them.

If I were you I would have wanted to claim I was drunk. Your “history” is garbage and it has been refuted already.

the dead trash at Kent State

That's pretty reprehensible.

Do you suffer from reading comprehension? The National Guard fired over the heads of the protestors and killed a couple of students who were walking to class. They had nothing to do with the protest. Do you think anyone attending Kent State at the time was a valid target?

I do not even know where to begin with someone as filled with hate and ignorance as you. I am not defending leftist trash as you put it. And quite honestly had then and still have great empathy for the guardsmen who found themselves in a very bad situation. People often forget that the guardsmen were also kids, most probably the same age as me and the students they fired on. The were trained, what training they had had, to fight wars not police college campuses. And were ill armed for the task at hand.

As for the Jackson State kids, they were not machined gunned in their dorms. The were killed by shotgun fire in the streets and there were only 2 killed not 4. Before you start spouting invectives read up on your history, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. If the student killed at Jackson State by the local and state police was not personally involved in the rioting and burning going on that day then his death was just as tragic as those at KSU. As for the second person killed, he was a local black man who just stopped to see what was going on on the way home from the grocery store. Wrong place at the wrong time. I guess by your standards he was a punk who deserved to die too. Or is it just the Buffys and Skippys of the world that deserve to die, as you seem to intimate in your rants. Trying to make the argument, an erroneous one in your case, that somehow the killing of other innocent people in another riot situation that month makes the KSU killings acceptable is pretty week for someone who is supposedly a lawyer.

As for my father and his friends they were combat veterans who had seen enough killing. My dad flew 23 sorties over Germany as a waist gunner on a B-17, I wonder how many of you beer drinking friends at the KofC hall could make that claim. He and others like him supported their government, too often without question. He had never said a word against the war, but had said plenty about the antiwar protesters. He was a real love it or leave it guy until KSU. He had a son and a daughter in college at the time and was smart enough to realize that those INNOCENT kids going to class could have been his. He forbid me to join the navy after HS because in his words he fought a war so I wouldn’t have to and could go to college. I didn’t like it at the time but I respected his wishes. My friend’s dads all felt the same way. They had given their years on the front lines and carried guns into battle for the country so hopefully their sons wouldn’t have too. They all gave at least tacit support to the war because the government said it was a just war, most voted for Nixon, few for Wallace, and proudly saluted the flag and loved their country. I know my dad thought that Daly was too easy on the “68” demonstrators and would have gladly bashed the head of anyone he saw desecrating the flag. However, the difference between my dad and other WWII vets like him, and people like you and your beer drinking buddies is that they were intelligent thoughtful people who didn’t live their lives wrapped around quicky slogans. You say you are an attorney, that is a scary thought based on your ranting on this thread. My dad never went to college, but he had enough wisdom and smarts to know you don’t put high powered assault weapons in the hands of scared, nervous 18-19 year old kids, put them on a crowded college campus, in an indefensible position and call it crowd control. He also knew the difference between combatants in a religious war and student protesters on a college campus, you do not seem to be so endowed. As a Catholic I won’t comment on the righteousness of St. Dominic’s orders to his Catholic army, but I would like to think that a truly religious man would also understand the differences.

Just so you don’t feel too special I’ll will let you know I am from a small town and grew up with a lot of beer drinking, slogan spouting guys like you. They have never been in the service, never carried a weapon in defense of the country and have never seen war, but they know all about it and are more than willing to send others off to fight and die for their beliefs. They are also quick with the annihilation comments, i.e, “Let’s turn Iran into a glass parking lot, bomb Mecca that will get their attention, put machine guns on the border and kill anyone trying to come across etc.” And lest you think I am some left wing nut, which you have more than insinuated, I have often said that the best way to stop eco-terrorism is to kill a few of the little spoiled brats who are torching the buildings. The difference is this, and I think my dad would agree, if the NG had come in and actually found the people responsible for burning the ROTC building and throwing the cement blocks at them and killed them I wouldn’t be having this discussion with you right now. But they didn’t. They came on campus put themselves in a very tactically untenable position, were armed with the wrong type of weapon for riot control and then opened fire wildly on a crowded college campus. For people like you too say everyone on a campus of 17,000 students that day was a punk who deserved to die is beyond pathetic.

As for your basic rules of gun use. The range of an M16 is 2.4 miles. So just as a hypothetical what if one those stray bullets had hit a car driving past campus and killed a woman going to pick her kids up at school? Would that have been all right too by your standards? After all she was in the area as delineated by the weapon being used, another consideration of those basic rules.

I doubt I will be needing to learn the Koran and Arabic anytime soon, though Spanish might be a different story. But it is your type of mentality that is the force behind the Islamic extremists zeal that drives them to attack innocents in pizza parlor in Israel, the markets in Baghdad and fly planes into buildings. Like you they see nothing but black and white there is no gray, you are either one of us or you are the enemy. There are no innocents. If you are where the bomb goes off then you must be an acceptable target or you would have been there. KSU officials didn’t call off class or shut down the campus that day. In fact they told kids to go to class, which is exactly what the four students who were killed were doing. I am sure Osama and his ilk have said many times kill’em all and let Allah sort it out.

What happened at KSU on May 4th and Jackson State on May 14th were both tragedies. They were tragedies because history seems to show us that those killed were innocents not involved in the riots. There were no doubt people on both those campuses that deserved to be shot it just wasn’t the people who were. But that won’t make any difference to you of course because it is much easier to just lump everybody together and kill’em all isn’t it?

If you want to continue this discussion feel free, but it won’t be with me. I learned a long time ago that you can’t argue with or change the mind of someone driven by hate and ignorance.

Good. We'll see whether you will cut and run or feel compelled to continue. Again, George McGovern was a B-24 pilot in WWII which certainly did not make him an expert on Vietnam. If your father and your friends' fathers weakened on the basis of tears and flapdoodle over whether their flesh and blood, apparently not brought up to support the nation against the campus Cong, might reap the consequences of their stupidity, then your father and your friends' fathers were wrong and were wrong because they caved in the face of our nation's campus enemies.

Even if you were right about the dead trash taken out at Kent State, the blame lies not with the guard but with campus punks hurling concrete chunks at the guard. The analogy is that when bank robbers shoot at cops but the cops firing back at the perps kill bystanders in bank robberies, it is called "felony murder" and is just as punishable as any other murder. Speaking of ignorance, look it up. I have a JD and I bet you don't. Of course that assumes that the dead were innocent. You keep saying so but but what, other than the self-serving claptrap of their drama queen families and of the campus Cong is offered as proof. There are bad Eagle scouts and bad ROTC guys too just as there were bad McGoverns.

That's Muffy and Skipper (all purpose rhetorical stand-ins for the spoiled and brainless). Muffy and Skipper are in so many places these last few decades. I recognize that few at Kent State were full Muffies or Skippers which usually requires long periods of brain (if any) rot at the local polo club or yacht basin. Think of the Kent State gulls as Muffy and Skipper wannabes, admiring the mental vacuity and irresponsibility of the real thing.

Daley WAS far too easy on the 1968 punks in the street: Hayden, Bobby Seale, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and their ilk. I know one then young woman who was wearing a fur coat in a band of anti-American demonstrators when she was shoved through a plate glass department store. The coat protected her physically. She was angry at the time. She came from a liberal Democrat family that supported her trip to Chicago. Within two years, she figured it out and has spent the rest of her life as a quite conservative Republican. All well and good but when she joined in a mob challenge to police in the streets of Chicago, she forfeited any ground to complain if she had been killed.

No one but no one who supports the guard or the Chicago police has any credibility whining over the fate of those winning Darwin awards for challenging or being in the vicinity of others challenging legitimate authority. Again, not the noticeable absence of campus riots threatening guardsmen's lives since the action at Kent State.

If Muffy or Skipper and their windtunnel equivalents commit suicide by cop or guardsmen, I shed no tear. As to Jackson State, I yielded to facts posted many posts ago. The people there got what they deserved as well BUT I stand on the ground that the non-fatal 460 bullets fired at a Jackson State dormitory according to Hoover's FBI were not necessary even if they harmed no one.

Some smart mouthed punks ran into reality at the hands of guardsmen under attack at Kent State and you get very upset. Do something worthwhile with those rampaging emotions and weepy flapdoodle of yours and stick up for the 50+ million unquestionably innocent sliced diced and hamburgerized since Roe vs. Wade.

If those killed at Kent State were so innocent why was an anti-American POS like Scott Ritter out there flapping his gums in their defense. Did you know that Scotty the internet molester wannabe served in the Marines??? Don't blame the Marines for Scotty. He needs to be responsible for his own behavior.

If the woman picking up her kids were killed, the responsibility is on the punks causing the guard to fire in self-defense. That is the law whether you like it or not.

As to hate, I absolutely despise the New Left, its participants and its allies and the Islamofascisti as well. If you don't, that is your problem. Our job as conservatives is to see to it that your Kumbaya problem does not become our nation's problem. The history of mankind is replete with warfare. We have no responsibility to sit around the fireside singing Kumbaya with our enemies. Teheran, flattened, blackened and glowing in the dark is a far more appealing idea than Iran wielding nukes against the US or its allies. The goings on at Kent State and the death of those killed is far more appealing than letting the mangy "revolutionaries" continue to escalate their warfare against our society. If you disagree, then as your dad apparently believed in his more sensible days, find a country that better reflects your fecklessness. If you stay here and don't wind up needing to spout the Koran or learn Arabic, it will be because of better men than you, men like the guard at Kent State.

I think that anyone participating in a mob action against the guard which included throwing chunks of concrete at guardsmen and charging the guard whose rifles were drawn deserved to be shot whether a Kent State student or not.

As to reading comprehension, felony murder is felony murder and the guardsmen were entitled to fire in self-defense. IF (a big IF) anyone killed or shot was innocent, the doctrine of felony murder places the burden where it belongs on the perps of the mob action. If you don't comprehend this well-settled principle of law, then research it. The only thing wrong with the guard response was that they fired over the heads of the protesters instead of INTO the heads of the protesters and wannabe guard killers. AND, wasn't it four dead and seventeen wounded, speaking of reading comprehension???

Kumbaya has no place in conservatism.

And John the Traitor Kerry served in Vietnam or hadn’t you heard. He was and remains an enemy of our country as well. Your stats suggest that the guard was batting at least .500 and maybe .750 or 1.000. Not too shabby.

What was reprehensible was poor marksmanship leading to an all too low body count. Brush up on your Koran and your Arabic in case you prevail in imposing Kumbaya toward our nation’s enemies then or now.