The guns of May

I couldn’t help but chuckle and shake my head when the pro-gun folks reacted to the Virginia Tech tragedy by proclaiming that what colleges need is more students with guns. The first thing that popped into my mind was, “I bet they wouldn’t have said that in May 1970,” even though I hadn’t thought of those days since, well, May 2006. And the May before that, and so on.

The right-wingers who flog the Second Amendment as the remedy to America’s crime problems need to be careful what they wish for. Today, an armed student body is just the NRA’s latest dangerous daydream. But for many furious students in 1970 — and who knows when a similar situation could happen again? — it would have seemed like some revolution fantasy come true.

If you’re not a baby boomer and/or don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s not your fault. You’re apparently not supposed to know. The only time May 1970 enters public consciousness now is when the press digs out its annual news piece about May 4, the anniversary of the Kent State shootings. They dust off the photo of the woman on one knee, crying; they mention that Kent State students were protesting Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia; and if you’re lucky, they’ll play Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “Ohio” in the background. And that was the end of the troubles that year, viewers, so let’s move on. Come on, move along, nothing to see here.

We Americans aren’t known for caring about our own past, but the way in which the wild days after Kent State have fallen down the official memory hole is a bit creepy. The cold, hard fact is that May 1970 was a violent, chaotic time that scared the bejesus out of the established order.

Historians rightly portray 1968 as the year when the country seemed to be coming apart. For sheer keening rage, however, the month of May 1970 was unlike anything seen in the United States since the Civil War. Within 10 days of the Kent State killings, approximately 4 million students went on strike, nearly 500 colleges were brought to a halt, and serious violence rocked hundreds of American campuses. This was only two years after several governments around the world were overthrown or changed radically by student uprisings, and many serious people, including some in government, saw America as teetering on the edge.

So what happened next? Well, the school year ended, and “the kids” went home. For once, good timing was on Nixon & Co.’s side. But what if, as gun supporters now advocate, students in America in 1970 were well-armed and sitting on a load of ammo? The resulting scope of the post-Kent State disaster is almost unimaginable, but I can picture what could have happened at USC in Columbia, where I was a student.

In real life, after Kent State, the USC administration building was seized and trashed by students who were enraged by the school Board of Trustees’ refusal to condemn the killings in Ohio. City police couldn’t control the scene, so here came the state troopers, a substantial number of whom were hit by flying bricks and rocks. A couple of hours later, with at least a thousand students assembled in the Quad between two rows of old dorms, the National Guard unloaded with tear gas. Students scattered into the dorms, where many of them recovered and promptly returned to the fray, faces covered with wet cloths, and armed with new bricks and rocks. Finally that night, the campus quieted down, and a curfew was imposed. The next night was worse, with police and state troopers chasing some protesters into their dorms and beating the hell out of anything that moved. The heavy-handed police tactics infuriated even students who supported the war.

But what if, as envisioned by current gun rights supporters, the students had been fully armed and loaded? Given the level of rage on campus that day, I can imagine what would have happened. At the first sign of the police pulling their guns and pointing them directly in students’ faces — something I saw firsthand — Second Amendment-loving students would have started shooting, and policemen would have dropped like flies all around the Quad. Police would have returned fire, and some students would have died, while others ran into the dorms and started shooting back at the police from windows. When the National Guard showed up, they would have been equipped with much more than tear gas, and the massacre at Kent State would have ended up looking like a picnic. Multiply all this by 500, the minimum number of colleges at which violence took place in May 1970, and the potentially disastrous cost of the gun lobby’s latest trip to la-la land becomes clear.

Gun rights supporters claim, “An armed society is a safe society,” which would be a neat little slogan if life could be lived in a fantasy. But in the real world, an armed society is tantamount to insanity. At the very least, it’s a prescription for disaster.

This article appears in May 9-15, 2007.