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Audio Analysis Brings New Revelations From Kent State Shooting
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."
In a live fire situation 70 seconds may as well be next Tuesday.
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.
If it was Hoovers blackmailing rogue "evil" FBI, the same FBI that was doing cointel pro and using urban warfare tactics on the weathermen and black panthers, this is an FBI that could have easily incited this. They call them agent provocateurs. Their role is to incite violence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVNu9XWQob4
The article states that there is video evidence of Terry Norman being chased by someone claiming he shot someone, running away and handing his gun to an officer that opens it and states that it's been fired 4 times. This before, as the article calls it, "the volley". The most empathetic suggestion would be that Terry was attacked physically, then answered with shooting. This wouldn't have been a direct provocation to open fire, but it would have increased tensions quite a bit, obviously. In no way would he be directly responsible for triggering the massacre.
Emotions! In your brain!
Definitely a fair point. However, if someone starts waving a gun around and firing shots, that's a good way to whip up a crowd of angry people into a fury, where the guardsmen might have legitimately felt threatened. 70 seconds is probably too long for him to have been directly responsible, but just about the right amount of time to have been a crucial catalyst.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
70 seconds seems like a substantial delay between an action and a provoked response
Not really. It sounds like just about enough time for the chain-of-command to relay an order down to the troops to clear out the area with force.
Here is a direct link to the actual story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer: "Kent State tape indicates altercation and pistol fire preceded National Guard shootings (audio)"
--it should have been in TFS.
But feeling threatened is no excuse to start picking off uninvolved, unarmed people hundreds of feet away at random. "Someone in the crowd may have a gun, so shoot them all to be safe"
\
Indeed. From TFA:
I don't care why you're posting AC
My brother was a student at Kent State and there the day of the shooting. He had always insisted that the guards did not fire first.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young will need to revise their lyrics?
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
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!
Reporter: We want to interview Terry Norman. Where is he?
FBI Liazon: He's deceased.
Reporter: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. When did he die?
FBI Liazon: Tomorrow.
Looks like the FBI fired first.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
It doesn't mean it was HIS .38 firing. That's hardly an uncommon caliber.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
For ordering the Ohio National Guard to be at Kent State. Maybe I'll go spit on his grave today.
No one, the Ohio National Guard included, is debating whether the guard opened fired and killed protesters. This is unequivocally true. The question here is whether sometime before the guardsmen open fire if someone else in the crowd fired shots contributing to the shooting by either riling the crowd towards violence or causing the guardsmen to feel threatened and thus clear the area with violence or both.
More from TFA:
The new analysis of the audio recording lends credibility to existing evidence that Norman fired *his* gun. It's no longer just a case of his word against that of a bunch of hippie protestors, and warrants the further investigation that is now taking place.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Han shot first.
Oh, sorry, wrong conversation.
Grew up in the area, had friends that (later) went to KSU, was pre-HS at the time.
My father had a friend at work who had a daughter going to KSU. A few days before this got so bad, she called her dad, telling about what she heard from the apartment above. (thin walls, thin floors, cheap college rental) She heard the students there calling all over the US, lining up people to bring in to help with the protest. She was scared - her father picked her up and brought her home.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
He is working on a blog post about it now.
Home of The Suki Series
Neither. The article says he would sell pictures to the FBI after events. Freelance photographer.
Home of The Suki Series
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.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Ever been hit in the face with a thrown rock? It won't just leave a bruise; you WILL require surgery, and pray to God you don't have a fractured skull or spinal column (the likely result if the rock busts through your teeth into your mouth).
This sounds as if you were hit on the face with a thrown rock. Were you?
I actually researched this once, in the context of the Israeli soldiers killing Palestinian rock-throwers and justifying it with the claim that stones were "lethal weapons."
No Israeli soldier was ever killed by a Palestinian throwing a rock at him.
As it turned out, Slate had an article on the more general subject ("Getting stoned: how many police officers have been killed by rocks?"), which reported 3 police officers killed by rocks, 1 of them thrown, since 1792, and none in the last 70 years (out of 18,983 fatalities). Police departments teach that a rock isn't deadly beyond 50 feet.
I can't imagine how a policeman wearing riot gear, which includes a helmet and face shield, could be killed by a thrown rock.
(Actually, I was hit in the face myself with a thrown rock, by a neighborhood kid who was pelting my house with stones. He broke the window I was looking through. I had a minor cut from the glass, but no serious damage. I caught the kid and brought him home to his parents, who were profusely apologetic and fixed the window.)
my guess is that the shooter was hired by the fbi's cointelpro unit and purposely fired the shots in order to get the desired response of overzealous national guardsmen.
...
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.
At least half of the deceased had nothing to do with the protest, and were simply walking between classes as they were gunned down. Go ahead and defend that.
Was hit in face with a rock. Lost an eye.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
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.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.
Actually, the tape was well known and was used in the original investigations. This is a copy that was made by plaintiffs lawyers and then placed in an archive.
There doesn't seem to be much information I could discern as to where on the campus the recording was made (a dorm window). Nor does a 20-year-old cassette copy of a 40-year-old reel-to-reel make me put much faith in the information that was "revealed" through unknown audio processing.