When the Guns Turned on Students

Four students were gunned down by national guardsman at Kent State 55 years ago. Are we on the brink of deadly escalation again?

Fifty-five years ago today, my friend Kate D’Angelo was a student making her way across the campus at Kent State University. Like thousands of others across the country, she was navigating a college experience shaped by political unrest, grief over classmates drafted to a war they didn’t support, and a sense that the world was unraveling. On that spring day in 1970, the Vietnam War had just expanded into Cambodia, and protests erupted nationwide.

Kate wasn’t holding a sign. She was trying to get to class.

Listen to the Wide Awake America interview with Kate D’Angelo here":

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Tear Gas and Helicopters

The night before, she’d watched from her dorm as helicopters circled the campus, dropping tear gas on anyone who dared step outside. Students staggered into the lobby, coughing, blinded, faces raw. She stayed in that night, hoping the worst would pass.

Earlier that day, Ohio Governor James Rhodes had arrived on campus by helicopter. From a podium, he unleashed a blistering tirade, calling student protesters "the worst type of people that we harbor in America," and claiming they were "worse than the brownshirts and the communist element." He vowed to use "every weapon possible" to restore order. His speech fanned the flames of a volatile situation, painting students not as citizens expressing dissent, but as revolutionaries to be crushed.

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No Exit

By the next day, Monday, May 4, Kate planned to steer clear of the demonstration and head to her noon class. The Ohio National Guard had set up camp on the practice football field, with military tents and vehicles visible from nearly every part of campus. Their presence was a constant reminder of the state’s readiness to meet protest with force. Her class was canceled. Rather than retrace her steps, she took a more direct path back, still intending to avoid the protest.

Then the gunfire started.

At first, she thought it was fireworks. Then came the ambulances. She followed a path up the back side of Blanket Hill, through the trees, toward the sounds of sirens and screams. Blood pooled so thick on the pavement she questioned how a single person could hold that much. Some students lay wounded. Four were already dead.

Kate joined a human circle of students holding hands around a classmate who’d been shot, shielding him with their bodies. Someone handed her a torn bed sheet in anticipation of more bullets and bloodshed. That day, students were preparing to become a victim or a medic.

She remembers looking back toward her dorm. The path was gone. Armored personnel carriers blocked the way, and the National Guard had formed a perimeter around the hill near Taylor Hall. Hundreds of students were surrounded. Some had come to protest. Others, like Kate, had simply tried to get to class. Now all were sitting, quiet, horrified, exposed.

The Guardsmen dropped to one knee and aimed. Kate counted roughly 144 loaded rifles.

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The Five Minutes That Changed Everything

Professor Glenn Frank, who taught geology, had served in the military and was known as a conservative. On that day, he saw what students could not: the trap that had been laid. He had taught nearly every student on campus and his own son was in the crowd. Frank begged the National Guard commander for a chance to de-escalate. He was granted five minutes.

With a bullhorn in hand, Frank pleaded:

“I don’t care if you’ve never listened to anyone before in your lives. I am begging you right now. If you don’t disperse right now they are going to move in and it will be a slaughter. Would you please listen to me?”

Even from a distance, Kate could see Frank’s brush cut head look up and she could see the guardsman. What she and the students couldn’t see was a way out. For her, it looked like shooting fish in a barrel. The senseless war they had protested was now bringing senseless violence directly to them.

Professor Frank came back on the bullhorn. He had secured a way out.

“You can stand up, turn to your right and follow me through the trees over there.”
He held up something they could see and led the way out.

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The Danger of This Moment

That standoff with rifles trained on the heads of unarmed students could have ended with dozens more deaths. The war they were protesting had come home. And the line between foreign combat zones and American campuses seemed to disappear.

That’s what makes this moment feel so dangerously familiar.

Once again, students are protesting, this time, the carnage in Gaza, the censorship at home, and the dismantling of democratic structures. And once again, elected officials are suggesting that the military be used to crush dissent on college campuses.

Senator Josh Hawley recently said:
"Send in the National Guard. Enough is enough."

Donald Trump, echoing the rhetoric of Governor Rhodes, has described campus protesters as:
"Radical-left thugs," "terrorists," and "Hamas supporters," adding:
"When I’m back in the White House, we will shut them down."

Governor Ron DeSantis has threatened to defund universities and dissolve student groups in a chilling echo of the crackdown decades ago.

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The Costs of Silence

If we learned anything from May 4, 1970, it’s that escalation breeds tragedy. That kettling students, surrounding them, and giving them no exit is not just a tactical failure—it’s a moral one. We must resist the return of that kind of authoritarian impulse. And we must recognize that when the government crosses the boundaries that exist to protect the most privileged students, they have already trampled the rights of those on the margins.

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The Forgotten Massacre

Two years before the shootings at Kent State, another campus massacre had already taken place, though few remember it.

On February 8, 1968, at what is now South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, police opened fire without warning on Black students protesting a segregated bowling alley. Three young men were killed:
Samuel Hammond, Henry Smith, and Delano Middleton.
Twenty-eight others were wounded.

There were no national headlines, no widespread outrage. The silence that followed Orangeburg is part of the same playbook—one that dehumanizes students, especially students of color, and prepares the public to justify the unjustifiable.

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A Choice Still Remains

There is still time to choose a different path. One grounded in de-escalation. One that honors the right to protest—even when we disagree. And one that remembers what happens when the country turns its back on the constitution, and the right to protest, and instead turns its guns on dissenters.

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PS

Interviewing Kate D’Angelo, I can hear the emotion in her voice as she describes the events of 55 years ago. The pain remains and so does the defiance. She is still speaking out, still protesting, and encouraging others to use their voice as well, especially when it is scary.

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