4 May1970 / 30 May 2022: On Gun Violence
Minutes after the Ohio National Guard opened fire on protestors at Kent State, Mary Ann Vecchio kneels over the body of Jeffrey Miller.
Every year on May 4th, I stop for a few moments and go back to 1970. I was fifteen years old, living in Stow, Ohio, six miles from the Kent State University campus, when four students were killed and nine others wounded by National Guard troops during an antiwar demonstration. When I taught at Cedar Rapids Washington High School, the song I’d choose to play between classes on that date would be Neil Young’s “Ohio,” and sometimes the song would provide access to a teachable moment.
I came of age during the Vietnam War. It was one of the issues my father and I would butt heads over at dinner, to the discomfort or boredom of everyone else at the table, from my mother down to the youngest of my nine siblings. However, through these clashes with my father over the war and the protests against it, I not only sharpened my argumentative skills but also began to define my personal ethics.
I took the not unusual position that the war was wrong. No one had been able to persuade me that the United States should be militarily involved in a civil war taking place in a small Southeast Asian country. The domino theory seemed the concoction of paranoid minds. I didn’t know whether I could claim to be a pacifist, but when my dad took me on his annual Thanksgiving morning hunting trip after I turned fourteen, I refused to fire the .22 caliber rifle he’d handed me. When they flushed a deer from a thicket and Dad yelled, “Shoot, Dave!” I couldn’t, squeezing back tears. And the next Thanksgiving my parents decided to start a new tradition: a family hike followed by touch football.
In 1968, Nixon won the presidential election after a campaign based primarily on scare tactics, claiming he alone would be able to “lead us in these troubled, dangerous times,” pledging to “rebuild the respect for law,” and promising “we shall have order in the United States.”[1] He also vowed to scale back U.S. involvement in Vietnam, but that wasn't happening. On April 30, 1970, he announced on national television that the United States had invaded Cambodia, expanding the war. The next day, Friday, May 1, protests erupted on college campuses across the nation. At Kent State, on a large, grassy area in the middle of campus called the Commons, an antiwar rally was held at noon, featuring fiery denunciations of the war and Nixon. Another rally was called for Monday, May 4.
Between 1964 and 1973, nearly 2 million men were conscripted into military service so they could travel halfway around the world to fight a war that made little sense to them. In 1969, the Selective Service System held its first draft lottery, a random selection process. (In previous drafts, the method had been to draft the oldest men first.) Born in 1954, I wouldn’t be eligible for the draft for another three years. But I knew by heart Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” Phil Ochs’ “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” And I’d absorbed the antiwar messages of e.e. cummings’ “next to of course god america i” and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.
That Friday night after the rally at Kent State, anger seethed in the Water Street bars and eventually spilled out into the downtown streets, escalating into a confrontation between protestors and local police. Store windows were broken, and beer bottles were thrown at squad cars. The next day, Kent’s mayor asked Governor James Rhodes to send in the Ohio National Guard.[2] By Sunday, nearly a thousand soldiers occupied the campus, lending it the appearance of a war zone. Rhodes flew to Kent and, at a press conference, scolded the protesters, promising to apply the full weight of the law in dealing with them.
As was true of everyone, the war had touched me. I had a cousin who died in Vietnam on April 5, 1966, at the age of 19. The previous five summers, his family and two others would join us for a week, jam-packed into two rental houses a block from Lake Erie beaches. My next-door neighbor Jimmy Flowers went to Vietnam and returned radically altered – as Jimi, wearing a scruffy beard, shoulder-length hair, and a thousand-yard stare.
Although Kent State officials had informed students that the May 4th rally was prohibited, a crowd began to gather, and by noon, the Commons was filled with 3,000 people. About 500 core demonstrators were gathered around the Victory Bell at one end of the Commons, another 1,000 students were supporting the active demonstrators, and an additional 1,500 students were spectators standing around the perimeter of the area. Across the expanse of lawn stood 100 National Guard soldiers armed with M-1 rifles. The students were ordered to leave. When this had no effect, several Guards hopped in a jeep, drove across the Commons to tell the protestors to disperse, but quickly retreated when their command was met with angry shouting.
I was a student at Walsh Jesuit High School in Cuyahoga Falls. The Vietnam War came up often as a topic of discussion, especially in our Theology classes. One of the leading antiwar activists and pacifists at that time, Daniel Berrigan, was a Jesuit, and the majority of the Jesuits at Walsh supported his efforts. Brother McDonough, my 20th Century American History teacher, would later persuade me to canvass for the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern, the liberal Democratic senator from South Dakota. The 26th Amendment of 1971 had corrected a gross injustice by granting eighteen-year-olds (being drafted to fight in Vietnam) the right to vote, but my first vote didn’t alter Nixon’s landslide victory.
The National Guard troops locked and loaded their weapons, fired tear gas canisters into the crowd around the Victory Bell, and began to march across the Commons to break up the rally. The protestors retreated but then counterattacked with yelling and rock throwing. The Guard began retracing their steps until they reached what was known as Blanket Hill. As they arrived at the top of the hill, 28 of the more than 70 Guardsmen suddenly turned and discharged their weapons. Many shot into the air or the ground. However, some shot directly into the crowd. Altogether 67 bullets were fired in a 13-second flurry.
The victims were all a football field or more away from the National Guard when they were hit. Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause were active demonstrators. William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer were killed as they walked to classes; Schroeder was shot in the back. A photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen-year-old runaway screaming over the body of Miller, appeared on the front pages of newspapers and magazines throughout the country.
A number of our classmates lived in Kent, and news of the shootings quickly spread through the school hallways. We spent much of the rest of that week, first, in informal discussions about the event. Then the dam burst and the discussions spilled over into a range of topics, including education in general and our school in particular. One session got especially heated. As we expressed our grievances and declared we should be educating ourselves, Father Anderson slowly nodded, smiled, and said, “That’s exactly what you’re doing.”
The Walsh Jesuit High School Pioneer newspaper staff in 1970. I’m the curiously proud one in the left middle of the group.
Three hours after the shootings, the university was closed, not to reopen for six weeks. I was a cub reporter for the Pioneer, “published by and for the students of Walsh.” One of the juniors on the staff proposed we bypass the roadblocks that had been set up by taking back roads into Kent. I didn’t have a driver’s license but offered to ride along with him. I’m not sure if we were merely curious for our own sake or hoping to get a news scoop. In either case, that curiosity would not be satisfied. The campus was deathly still, 21,000 students suddenly gone, leaving no evidence of Monday’s tragedy.[3] Every non-essential downtown business was shuttered. Stoddard’s Custard, the Kent Road drive-in where my Little League baseball team went for soft-serve treats after every game, win or lose, was boarded up.
Looking back, I can’t help but compare that tragic event[4] to the world we live in today. Was it a forewarning that the double-barreled pressure of fear and hatred in an environment of widespread gun ownership would inevitably result in gun violence? Our frequently irrational and always inflated fears about personal safety have fed a gun epidemic. There are now more guns than people in the United States, and gun owners firmly believe this fact makes them safer. The students and teachers at Ross Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, didn’t feel safer. Nor did the shoppers at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York. Nor did the 17,798 Americans who have died of gun violence this year, as of Memorial Day.[5]
Gun violence is a multifaceted problem, and gun control isn’t the sole solution, but most Americans agree that universal background checks would be a positive step, and many agree that semi-automatic assault-style guns should be banned.[6] Lawmakers need to stop listening to the gun industry and NRA and start listening to the people. Upon watching the breaking news footage of the Kent State massacre on TV, Neil Young walked off into the woods and wrote “Ohio.” The haunting outro refrain memorializes the “four dead in Ohio.” To commemorate the thousands of victims of mass shootings in the U.S. since then, the song would have to go on for a long time.
Footnotes:
[1] These quotes from his televised campaign ads pandered to voters shell-shocked by recent events such as the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobbie Kennedy, the race riots and antiwar protests in U.S. cities, and the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
[2] Reluctance to serve in Vietnam had led many young men to join the National Guard, aware that they would not likely be sent to Vietnam.
[3] We didn’t see the bullet embedded in Solar Totem Number 1, a steel sculpture on the Commons. At the request of the artist, Don Drumm, the bullet is still there, a quiet memorial.
[4] This would not be the only mass shooting on a college campus that month. Eleven days later, city police and state patrol officers opened fire on Jackson State University students, killing two and wounding twelve.
[5] Per Gun Violence Archive data.
[6] Per The Pew Research Center’s Key Facts about Americans and Guns.