If this demonstration was anything like the ones that I attended, in those days, the shooting was exactly what the radicals wanted to happen. They relentlessly bait the authorities, hoping for a violent reaction that they can point to as proof that they are right about America. The Kent State affair succeeded perfectly for them.
It was a hopeless situation.
What was the Guard to do? Stand there and take rocks upside the head?
Liberals love to push, but they hate pushback.
IMHO the Guard used extreme restraint.
I is also MHO that the kids that were shot were innocents but they were not targeted.
The Guard was targeted.
The dead were collateral damage, and an aside to what was happening.
You are absolutely correct. The commies were hoping for a galvanizing action that would bring down “Amerikka” in their twisted world. I was a college student at the time in a midwest college. The college political science prof was outraged when all the students showed up for class the next day. When he expressed his disappointment that we weren’t out demonstrating, one student stood up and told him the students who got shot were asking for it. Of course, some of the people killed were not the ones assaulting the soldiers. I just wish the bullets had hit the SDS bas.....s who organized the slaughter.