The guardsmen had been on campus for three days, and everyone assumed the rifles were loaded with blanks.

The Kent State Massacre: Four Minutes That Shattered America

When the National Guard opened fire on unarmed students, a nation confronted its own reflection

National Guardsmen killed four unarmed students at Kent State, igniting the largest campus strike in American history.

The crack of M1 rifles shattered the midday air at 12:24 PM. Twenty-eight guardsmen, some barely older than the students they faced, wheeled in unison atop Blanket Hill and fired sixty-seven rounds in thirteen seconds. When the smoke cleared over Kent State University's commons, four students lay dead and nine wounded—one paralyzed for life.

The morning of May 4, 1970, had dawned with an uneasy tension hanging over the Ohio campus. For three days, protests against Nixon's secret expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia had escalated. The governor had deployed National Guard units, many exhausted from strike duty at trucking companies. Students milled about the commons, some protesters, others simply walking between classes.

Allison Krause, 19, had placed a flower in a guardsman's rifle barrel the day before, asking 'Flowers are better than bullets, right?' Now she lay dying on the pavement, shot through the chest. Jeffrey Miller, 20, whose death would be immortalized in John Filo's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, had been 265 feet from the nearest guardsman. Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder—neither participating in the protest—were killed simply for being there.

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💡 One of the wounded students, Dean Kahler, was shot while lying flat on the ground trying to take cover—the bullet severed his spine, but he later became a county commissioner and lifelong advocate for nonviolent protest.