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.
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.