This is an article I wrote for askalibertarian.com for the anniversary of this awful event.
May 4th, 1970 - Kent State Massacre
A group of students were protesting the Vietnam War spreading into Cambodia. The students and police had escalating confrontations and the police accused a group of students of throwing things at them The Ohio National Guard was called in on May 2nd. Increasing confrontations happened over the next two days.
Governor Rhodes further inflamed tensions by calling the protesting students “the worst type of people that we harbor in America.” A group of 77 fully equipped National Guard members using tear gas and bayonets eventually opened fire on a crowd of students. 4 students were killed and 9 were injured. Two of the murdered students were not even involved in the protests, but were simply walking to class.
In the days leading up to the massacre, there was vandalism in downtown Kind and bars hat to close early and a curfew was imposed on the residents. The Kent State ROTC Building was also burned down. No one to this day knows with certainty who burnt down the ROTC building, but it is now believed to be a group of radical protestors who were not students.
A quote from the father of one of the victims on the day after the shooting was “Is dissent a crime? Have we come to such a state in the country that a young girl has to be shot because she disagrees deeply with the actions of her government?”
No accounts indicate that the students committed violence against any person. It does appear that the student protestors did commit some vandalism, which Libertarian principles denounces as an initiation of force. Destroying another individual’s property violates the Nonagression Principle and the students responsible should have been responsible to pay to replace the damaged property.
This option was taken off the table the moment the National Guard began firing on unarmed students. During the protests, there were up to approximately 3,000 protesters at different times, but it’s unclear how many protesters there were at the time of the incident as it was clear that there were students and onlookers walking around campus and simply walking to classes. There were 77 Guardsmen and 28 fired upon the crowd.
Freedom of assembly and speech are what Libertarian theory consider Natural Rights and they are protected in the First Amendment to the Constitution. The students absolutely had a right to protest the Vietnam War and to peacefully assemble to demand that their voices be heard. They did not have the right to commit vandalism.
The National Guard escalated the confrontations all the way up to shooting indiscriminately into a crowd of students. There is no justification for that and indeed the shooting did not make students at other universities around the country think twice about protesting the war. This shooting only served to escalate and inflame the already heightened tensions of protests going on around the country.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. We still have tensions on college campuses around the country as to the direction of free speech on campus. Should students be required to stay within “free speech” zones on campuses or if they’re on the grounds of a public university, should students be free to openly exercise their first amendments rights of assembly and speech without interference since it should be considered public land?
President Trump announced that the US military was bombing Syria in retaliation to an alleged chemical weapons attack on Syrian Civilians and the US Military recently killed “a couple hundred” Russians in Syria in February of 2018 which could have obviously spiraled out of control almost instantly. Increased outcry against escalating military intervention has been seen from all ends of the political spectrum.
Those who don’t gain the wisdom of the past will repeat its mistakes. It’s ok if we, as a society, are still figuring out how to handle freedom of speech on college campuses and exactly what that “red line” is that would require US intervention overseas but any time we can pause and try to learn from those experiences from our past, we should strive to. It is how we will progress as a society. It should be clear that the Libertarian standard is to Wage Peace and speak freely, even the most unpopular opinions.
Tin Soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dean in Ohio
