Bet that salutes or cherry bombs were set off in the crowd to cause the troops to fire on the leftist trash who were advancing against the troops. Note also that there is no mention of the ROTC building at Kent State being burned to the ground the night before and that Governor Rhodes (a competent but "moderate" Republican had become directly involved with Richard Nixon's blessing). Those shot including the allegedly "innocent" bystanders well knew that they should avoid the area where the guard were stationed but they were simply bound and determined to defy authority, intimidate the guard, seize effective control of public lands and, they had been assured by their leaders that "the system" did not have the guts to stand up to them. It did. Some are long dead with some crippled exceptions. They got no more than they deserved.
It is no surprise that CNN and CBS feel a need to regurgitate the lying leftist propaganda of yesteryear. Try and remember even ONE significant anti-war confrontation with armed guardsmen ever after.
The other missing part of this story is that the left was shocked!, shocked! at the general public enthusiasm for the shootings. In the next few days, they shaved the beards, cut the hair, stopped by the laundromat for the first time in years, took showers or baths ditto, and went door to door in middle class neighborhoods in an apologetic manner seeking clues as to where they had lost what they had thought of as public support.
I was watching a Yankee baseball game on that afternoon in the Knights of Columbus Hall. Just before the news bulletin as to Kent State, a group of liberal union members (back when you could be an economic liberal, a Democrat and a Catholic all at one time) from the local Armstrong Tire factory came in, got seats at the bar and ordered their first beers. The guy sitting next to me was a leader of the Rubber Workers and a fellow with whom I got along despite his being more liberal than most. In response to the bulletin, I said to the fellow: "The National Guard killed four students at Kent State." To my utter surprise, his immediate response was: Too bad it wasn't forty. The next union guy said: Four hundred! The next: Four thousand. And so forth around the bar. A liberal, a patriot, a Catholic, a union leader and a very sensible man on the Kent State matter.
See what mbb1984 posted above at #4 and #5. He/she says it all as well as it can be said.
Make a comparison with the so-called Boston Massacre. Anti-Brit though I am, the soldiers were right and the dead were wrong, as proven by John Adams to the satisfaction of a Boston jury.
Those who want to cuddle the oh soooo romantic revolutionary wannabes of yesteryear only serve to encourage them and the cuddlers are no better than the cuddlees. If you want to enslave your descendants that will have to be your business. I won't sit by while you try to enslave mine.
If any descendant of mine behaves as those did at Kent State for similar reasons, and gets shot or killed in the process, I will miss them but not object. Likewise, if any descendant robs a bank or murders a neighbor or whatever. Marching on guardsmen whose rifles are drawn sent to guard the campus the day after a major anti-military arson has a name. It is not just the rank stupidity that is the very definition of leftist college trash, their professors and other instigators and agitators. It is suicide by guard. As to "innocent passersby," those who don't play in the highway have a better chance of not being hit by tractor trailers. As to the guard, it was not negligence but self-defense. Good for them.