Audio Analysis Brings New Revelations From Kent State Shooting 289
a_nonamiss writes "The Cleveland Plain Dealer is reporting today on new forensic analysis by audio scientists Stuart Allen and Tom Owen on a recently discovered audio tape from the Kent State shootings. The analysis suggests that four shots from a .38-caliber pistol were fired 70 seconds before the National Guard opened fire on a crowd of student protesters, killing four and wounding nine others. The alleged shooter, student Terry Norman, was hired by the FBI to take photos of the protesters. It has been known for some time that he had a .38-caliber pistol on his person the day of the shootings, but he has always claimed that the gun was not fired during the protest, a claim that was backed up in sworn testimony from authorities at the time."
flowers to a gun fight (Score:4, Insightful)
hmm FBI employee shoots his weapon to get something started and then plausibly denys it. nothing to see here.
on that note. never take a flower to a gun fight. when an armed person(legal authority or otherwise) tells you to stop, leave, get out of his face, and you don't have a weapon. you leave, period. you don't just stay there thinking they are not going to shoot you because you are "peaceful". they don't know that and they probably don't care.
Re:Cause and Effect (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:flowers to a gun fight (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. Obey authority. Always. Because they will kill you if you do not.
Re:flowers to a gun fight (Score:2, Insightful)
Absolutely. Obey authority. Always. Because they will kill you if you do not.
WRONG
He said don't go unarmed.
I bet you're against the Second Amendment being interpreted as an individual right, too, aren't you? Now do you see WHY there's a Second Amendment, and why it is an INDIVIDUAL right?
Re:flowers to a gun fight (Score:1, Insightful)
Depends what your goal is. If your goal is to get out of there alive then sure. If your goal is to make a point, then no.
Re:Not a direct provocation, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll give you that Mr. Norman probably didn't directly trigger the massacre, although shooting a gun in a crowd of angry people probably didn't contribute to happy peaceful feelings at the protest. However, the government at the time seems to have actively and knowingly participated in a cover-up. This bothers me a lot. It should bother everyone. A lot.
Re:flowers to a gun fight (Score:5, Insightful)
Government agents infiltrate situations or causes to instigate and manufacture threats, violence, or confusion in order to promote or convince the rest of the country to condone action against said infiltrated group? Tell me it ain't so?
Also, in other news, the sky is blue.
It baffles me how people just accept the stories they are fed without ever questioning them. It is downright sickening to see how people just open their heads and let things just pour in, unchecked.
Next thing you know, someone is going to suggest that governments spread stories through the media outlets or back actual actions -- either of which promote suspicion of and urgency in dealing with foreign threats to justify taking action on a national level -- from sanctions to blockades and tariffs to military action against them....!
Re:flowers to a gun fight (Score:3, Insightful)
Lovely. Conservatives murder hippie protesters and then use that murder to point out that it wouldn't have happened if everyone would have been armed. You forgot to mention that if taxes weren't so high, the government wouldn't have been able to pay for the Guard to murder the hippies. Really, it was their bad politics that lead to them being shot at since no conservatives were being shot at by the National Guard that day.
Re:Not a direct provocation, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:70 seconds ??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cause and Effect (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:flowers to a gun fight (Score:0, Insightful)
Jesus you're off your rocker. So the Kent state students had it coming. How can you classify a clash between civilians and their government as a gun fight?
Does anyone know the exact moment that a police officer is authorized to use their weapon in a situation like this?
Re:Should Have Shot Them All (Score:5, Insightful)
Should have shot all of the traitors.
Except where would Obama get his advisors?
if you think shooting "traitors", such as those college kids, is acceptable, then shouldn't you be shot now for your opposition to Obama?
nice logic!
Re:flowers to a gun fight (Score:5, Insightful)
Conservatives murder hippie protesters
It is this polarization between parties that results in nothing being accomplished in America. Blanket statements like that are A) False, unless you can confirm that everybody that landed a bullet was a conservative, B) Begging the questions, for them to be murderers renders them shooters, for them to be shooters renders them conservative, for them to be conservative renders them against hippie protesters, round and round we go.
How about just saying that the Man fucked up. Screw party affiliation. If we are always blaming left or right, we will always get screwed up the middle by both. Stop viewing the world through the R-D filter and start viewing it as us (people) vs them (people we elect). Oh wait.
Re:70 seconds ??? (Score:1, Insightful)
lets see how your live gun shot recognition works when you are surrounded by an angry crowd throwing rocks at you, that you were sent to control.
i suppose in your scenario it would have all gone like this... .38 special, nothing to worry about at all, it only stings a little.
guard: hey we have just been shot at, someones trying to snipe us
guard 2: no moron that is only a
Re:Cause and Effect (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cause and Effect (Score:2, Insightful)
kill yourself, fascist
It's funny how this is marked troll but what he's responding to isn't. Society is doomed. (Yes, I just determined that by the mod behavior on Slashdot.)
Re:Not a direct provocation, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Spend any time with the justice system and you will see this for yourself.
It's not just Hollywood nonsense. Cops actually act like this. It's probably not limited to American cops either.
Cops won't even make their lies terribly believable. They benefit greatly from the respect they get from most people.
Re:flowers to a gun fight (Score:5, Insightful)
Or how about noticing that "left" and "right" are pretty much media inventions. To make politics easy to explain using sports metaphors. Yay for our team!
What this was, was people in power manipulating a situation to disadvantage people without power, and masses of people accepting the explanation, because they didn't have much choice, and anyway only one side was really heard. (Different sides in different places, but still only one side.)
It was after this that it coincidentally happened that all the major publishers started being acquired by major corporations...which wasn't a directly profitable action, publishing being relatively unprofitable. But which did mean that those publishers wouldn't print anything that the major corporations didn't approve of. (At least nothing they strongly disapproved of. The control was, and remains, indirect. The management chooses the editor who chooses what to publish.)
In this context it's worth noting that demonstrations now get minimal coverage in any media. This despite the fact that one would expect them to be more newsworthy as that occur less frequently.
Note that this is not a unanimous group. To call this a conspiracy is probably incorrect. It's merely that people in a position of power have certain interests in common that are not the same as the interests of people who are not in a position of power. And they tend to act to forward those interests.
Another thing that happened at around this time was that the political process was nominally loosened by allowing the easier formation of political parties while simultaneously centralized by removing the requirement that broadcasting stations allow equal amounts of partisan campaigning by all parties. This made money the central requirement for being heard. (It had already become a major requirement.)
Also note that in the US the election system (primarily, but not entirely, the means used to count the votes) is so structured that only two parties have a reasonable chance to win an election. There have been only a few times when an incumbent party became so weak that it essentially abdicated it's position to an alternate third party. Even Teddy Rooseveldt wasn't able to overcome this bias. I *think* that Instant Runoff would be quite superior, and I'm quite convinced that Condorcet voting would be superior. And, yes, it's true that it can be proven that no fair voting system can exist, but this doesn't mean that some aren't better than others. And the majority rule system is about the worst. (Not as bad as minority rule, of course.)
Re:Cause and Effect (Score:5, Insightful)
At some point, the soldiers selected targets and fired on them. No matter what the "tension" or "provocation," those men placed their cross-hairs on people who were obviously not a threat and executed them.
I would love to hear, in the soldiers' own words, how they picked their targets.
Re:Cause and Effect (Score:0, Insightful)
Based on what, besides your paranoid conspiracy theories?
No, a weighting of *all* of the evidence.
The photographer wasn't an FBI agent, he essentially took a free lance job from them.
But he *was* employed by them.
And this tape doesn't necessarily prove that HE was the shooter, just that someone fired 38 caliber bullets before the National Guard opened fire.
Only if you look at it in isolation.
1. Before the Guard opens fire, a man chases Norman towards the Guard, screaming that he had just shot someone. .38 to a Guardsman, who inspects it. .38 *had* been fired four times.
2. Norman gives his
3. The Guardsman exclaims that the gun had been fired four times (overheard by two neutral witnesses.)
4. The Guardsman and Norman then swear that the gun had not been fired.
5. Analysis shows that a
Now it's a pretty simple exercise to show that the Guardsman and Norman were lying. Unless you're just gonna stick your head in the sand and cry "lalalalalal I can't hear you!"
Re:flowers to a gun fight (Score:2, Insightful)
No psychic signal is necessary. All you need is the "freelance" photographer's boss to say "get in a scuffle and fire some shots where the guardsmen can here you. Or you get another "freelancer" to pick a fight with a guy who has a gun. [I put "freelance" in scare quotes because the photographer's gig was to go to protests and photograph the people there, to sell to the police and FBI.]
When you throw a match on a pool of gasoline, you don't need to send a psychic signal to get the gas to ignite.
cointelpro (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:70 seconds ??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:no firearms != unarmed (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I know anecdotal evidence means practically everything and Slate's research department is so thorough and concise that it's useless to argue against it, even after the writers expand on it and take things into their own context to prove a point that supports your view of Israel and Palestinian rock throwers.
Anyways, I was hit in the head with a rock once when I was 14. It was at camp and someone was throwing rocks over the side of a hill totally clueless that someone else may have been down hill. Well, as it turns out, the first rock he threw struck me in the back of the head slightly down from the top from a distance of about 75 feet and probably 45 foot in elevation. It took 16 stitches to to close up the wound/laceration, I was knocked off my feet and ended up falling another 10 or 15 feet downhill before another person grabbed me, and I suffered a Class II Hemorrhage which required a short stay in the hospital. We were taking a shortcut back from then horse stables and in an area that was posted as off limits because of how steep and dangerous it was.
If someone was attempting to do that on purpose, I would feel justified in attempting to shoot them as if I wasn't with people i was with and at a place where I could get reasonable medical attention in a short period of time, I could have bleed out and died on the spot. In my case, after about the third rock came over, everyone started yelling and then the kids throwing them paused and looked over the edge of the hill to see what was going on. They then ran and got the camp counselors who notified the camp nurse who was also a trauma rated paramedic. I also don't care about your personal instance of not getting injured when hit with a rock in the past as it says nothing about the seriousness of getting hit with a rock, just the seriousness of when you got hit with a rock.
Re:no firearms != unarmed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Cause and Effect (Score:4, Insightful)
Protestors are always a threat to those in power, whom the soldiers serve. In the end, the US - or any other country - is no different from China. Fear keeps the people in line. Fear of being killed next.
Re:Was this Hoover's rogue FBI? (Score:2, Insightful)
if i was the guarding over a field full of puppies and kittens, and i believed that one of them had fired a weapon at me. it would take me all of 5 seconds to return fire. 70 seconds is an eternity.
Re:no firearms != unarmed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:no firearms != unarmed (Score:2, Insightful)
One of the problems with all or nothing attitudes like yours is that you don't seem to want to look beyond the apparent immediate.
What I mean is, suppose your right and a single rock being thrown can't seriously harm someone in full riot gear. I bow hunt and have found myself chasing a wounded deer through the woods in order to put it down because it didn't bleed out our I somehow missed my mark and didn't place a critical shot. Now how this connects is that the wounded deer is not capable of running (it's main defense) like it normally would which gives me an advantage in seeking it out and performing the final blow. So you take a wounded police officer or whatever and now nonthreatening things become seriously threatening things.
But moreover, when you allow a group of people to throw things, you don't know that it's just rocks and not plague infested puss bags or makeshift bombs, grenades, or whatever else that could be more serious even in your eyes, until after the fact which is not any way to protect your law enforcement or yourself.
Now I'm not here to defend the national guard in their shooting or the Israeli defense forces, I'm here to say that throwing rocks is more serious then you portrayed and whether you want to believe it or not, you can kill someone by doing it. I can see from a tactical perspective where allowing rocks to be thrown can deteriorate into a dead soldier or LEO pretty quick when something seriously more dangerous enters the arena.
You also have to remember that when Kent State happened, it was still legal to shoot a suspect that was only fleeing. It wasn't until the mid 1970's that the supreme court changed that causing the situations we know today. So when looking at the instance, you have to sort of view it from the perspective of the time or you won't get an accurate view of it.