Police fire baton rounds at Kent State rioters

[wuushew]

COLUMBUS, Ohio - An end-of-year college block party spiraled out of control when police fired baton rounds and used pepper spray to break up hundreds of rioting students who sparked a string of street fires at Kent State University.



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30420034/

[hedgehog]

1. Protest a war and face bullets, set a couch on fire and face pepper spray.

[Ptah]

2. Flashback - 1970

Kent State gained international attention on May 4, 1970
when an Ohio Army National Guard unit fired at students
during a war protest on campus, killing four and wounding nine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_University#Kent_State_Shootings

[Ms. Toad]

5. Not really.

At both the University of Akron and Kent State University the May Day-Play Day (which coincides with the weekend following the last class of the semester) out of control student parties have been major problems since at least the mid-1990s. Students tend to travel between the two - particularly when they are not on the same weekend. Until recently, Akron had a reputation of being worse, but it cracked down and provided other official parties (and tore down all of the houses on a couple of streets that were major contributors to drunken brawls, furniture fires, etc.) - so the worst partying and attention have now been shifting to Kent.

[Ptah]

8. I meant the first glance of this story - with 'Kent State' and 'police fired' made me think back to

[Ms. Toad]

10. I'd probably have the same reaction, if it wasn't the same

headlines every year recently for those of us who are local.

[MADem]

3. Not quite "Four Dead in Ohio" is it? More like sixty four arrested in Ohio....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AvrZCYvVQI
(not their best effort, this)


What a bunch of fucking assholes these kids are.

Video posted on the Internet shows students hurling furniture and street signs into the flames on Saturday night as a SWAT team in riot gear converged on the crowd. Kent police said the party grew violent after one reveler was arrested and students began pelting officers with bottles, bricks and rocks.

"They were burning pretty much everything," said police dispatcher Rosemarie Mosher. "They were throwing stop signs on the fires, they were throwing chairs, couches, tree branches. Basically anything they could get their hands on."....When officers ordered the crowd to disperse, students built piles of couches, suitcases and other debris and lit them on fire. There were at least four fires blazing in the middle of the street, Mosher said.

Students who lived in nearby houses threw objects from windows to feed the flames. Video shows students huddled on a roof, escaping into a second-story window as a line of police, their faces masked by plastic shields, forms near the flames.

Choruses of boos were captured on video as firefighters doused the fires, and students cheered as others quickly ran back into the street to spark more.


What a mess: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49x8dFePZZc

Edit to add:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4SXUykLWZs&feature=channel_page

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqMBhEE35kQ&feature=channel

[Ms. Toad]

7. That's a pretty good description

of what has happened every year since at least the mid 1990s at either Kent State or University of Akron, or both. I had a friend who lived on one of the party streets - she had to leave her house to go somewhere else to study.

I've got no sympathy for those fools.

[Berry Cool]

12. This really is terribly typical of these students this time of year.

It's just not the end of the school year at Kent until someone sets a couch on fire. They just go nuts, and people get arrested--lather, rinse, repeat.

And no one would be any more surprised or concerned than the locals are if the name of their school was, oh I don't know, Podunk State College. But people from beyond the area find out that it's happening at--HORRORS!--Kent State University, and all of a sudden they think it's a replay of 1970. Um, no, not really. It's just the usual nonsense that goes on at the end of a school year when college kids go crazy.

Oh, and the ironic thing about 1970 is that if you asked the average Ohioan that April where the student protest situation was most likely to get ugly and out of hand that spring, the answer probably would have been not at Kent, but at Ohio U. Even today, the average Halloween weekend at OU makes spring insanity at Kent and Akron look like a wet firecracker.

Life's weird that way.

[alphafemale]

4. Holy crap. That wretched anniversery is like a week away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxfT79bIWuc&feature=related

[MADem]

9. Yeah....pretty self-indulgent and assholish way to "memorialize" it.

Those videos that the little shits posted are just....stupid. Talk about crapping on a legacy, even if it wasn't intentional.

You know who I feel sorry for? The kids who want to get an education and who don't act like idiotic animals, and the parents who sweated, struggled and saved to scrape up the tuition and fees to send their little darlings off to act like assholes.

[MikeE]

6. That's my alma mater

Usually the university is quite calm.

Of course the murders of those students by the Ohio National Guard will never be forgotten.

[L0oniX]

11. The murders at Kent State are the reason I will never trust our military personnel..