http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_massacre

 Originally Posted By: from article
The shootings killed four students and wounded nine. Two of the four students killed, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, had participated in the protest, and the other two, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder, had been walking from one class to the next at the time of their deaths. Schroeder was also a member of the campus ROTC chapter. Of those wounded, none was closer than 71 feet to the guardsmen. Of those killed, the nearest (Miller) was 265 feet away, and their average distance from the guardsmen was 345 feet.


Wikipedia accuracy aside, the larger picture is: there was protesting and rioting and violent action by the protestors, for several days, to the point that the Guard was called in to maintain order. And some degree of force was justified.

But...
The actual shooting that occurred by the National Guard seems to be a clumsy half-baked and disorderly action by the National Guardsmen who fired on the crowd.
Two of the 4 shot were protestors.
But two others were just students walking by, at some distance, on their way to class. And one of the two was an ROTC student!

So, I can't endorse what happened. And although I think some of the students may have deserved what happened to them (from their own malevolence that day and in days leading up to it), the National Guardsmen could not justify or explain why they fired at the precise moment of the shooting, when a later investigation was done.

I agree that there should have been a nationwide crackdown on the Left's deliberate push to undermine and destroy our cultural institutions, nationalism and government.
But this Kent State massacre is not a demonstration of how it should have been done.

(See Pat Buchanan's book Death of the West, in particular the chapter "Four Who Made A Revolution", to see the unquestionably marxist roots of 1960's liberalism, and how it definitely was --and is-- a strategy to undermine our institutions and destroy the United States. I agree with the goal of containing that Leftist radical threat, but not in incidents like Kent State, that hurt legitimate attempts to contain a legitimate threat. If anything, Kent State made it harder to crack down on university campus radicals after that.)