Kent State shootings

On May 4, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed college students at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, killing four and wounding nine others, one of whom was permanently paralyzed. The shootings occurred during a rally opposing the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, which President Richard Nixon had announced on April 30, as well as the National Guard's presence on campus and the draft. Twenty-eight guardsmen fired approximately 67 rounds over about 13 seconds.

Students Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 20, Allison Beth Krause, 19, and Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, died at the scene; William Knox Schroeder, 19, a member of the campus ROTC battalion, was pronounced dead at Robinson Memorial Hospital in Ravenna shortly afterward. Scheuer and Schroeder had been observing the protest from a distance during a break between classes rather than actively participating. Nine others were wounded, including Dean R. Kahler, who sustained a back wound that left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down. None of those shot was closer than 71 feet to the guardsmen, and the four who died were, on average, 345 feet away.

The events followed several days of escalating tension in Kent, including the burning of the campus ROTC building on the night of May 2 and a May 3 press conference at which Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes described protesters as "the worst type of people that we harbor in America." On May 4, an estimated 2,000 people gathered on the Commons despite university efforts to cancel the rally. After tear gas failed to disperse the crowd, roughly 96 guardsmen advanced with bayonet-fixed rifles, becoming boxed in near an athletic field before retracing their steps up Blanket Hill. As they reached the crest, several guardsmen turned and fired into the crowd of students, some of whom were fleeing. A subsequent FBI investigation concluded that the Guard had not been under fire and that guardsmen fired the first shots; the FBI also found reason to believe some guardsmen's stated fears for their lives were fabricated after the fact.

The shootings triggered nationwide protests and a student strike involving more than 4 million students at hundreds of institutions, and are credited with intensifying public debate over the Vietnam War and the Cambodian incursion.

Legal proceedings followed on multiple fronts. A grand jury indicted five guardsmen on felony charges and three others on misdemeanor charges; the guardsmen maintained they had fired in self-defense. In 1974, eight guardsmen were tried on federal charges of depriving students of their civil rights but were acquitted in a bench trial. U.S. District Judge Frank J. Battisti, who dismissed the charges, wrote that the government had not shown the defendants shot students "with an intent to deprive them of specific civil rights," while stating that such use of force "is, and was, deplorable." Civil wrongful-death and injury actions against Governor Rhodes, the Kent State president, and the guardsmen initially resulted in verdicts for the defendants. The President's Commission on Campus Unrest (the Scranton Commission) later concluded in its September 1970 report that the shootings were "unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable."