“Kent Who?” Sargeant Rod Claymore asked. A twenty-four year veteran of the Ohio State troopers, he wasn’t born when National Guard soldiers shot sixty-seven rounds into three-hundred protestors at Kent State University, striking thirteen, killing four (Allison Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Knox Schroeder) with a hit percentage of 19%.
The question—my question: “do you think law enforcement has learned anything since Kent State?”—fell on deaf ears. He also declined to answer whether he was one of the three-in-ten police officers who hit their spouses.
Claymore was speaking to me on behalf of the Ohio State troopers. I reached out to them about the infamous photograph of the sniper perched on the roof at Ohio State University taken just days ago—not in 1970. College students around the nation are protesting their universities’ financial gains from Israel smearing Gaza off of all known maps by erecting tents on college quads. This is offensive to college administrations because landscaping isn’t cheap. So they’ve called in the cops. And the cops have brought their guns.
“He was there for the protestors’ safety,” Claymore said of the sniper. I asked what that meant. “In case someone in the crowd became violent, he could stop them.”
“By ‘stop them’ do you mean shoot them?”
“Yes.”
“And wouldn’t a shot from a .50-cal sniper rifle kill someone?”
“Well obviously,” he chuckled. “You don’t have much experience around guns, do you? If someone in the crowd became violent, the sniper would have no choice.”
And by “someone in the crowd” I proposed, did he mean the police? He scoffed at that insinuation. “Police are trained in de-escalation tactics these days.”
The BBC points out that police in the United States are far more likely to kill people than police anywhere else. They also have the fewest required hours of training among developed nations, with less than 1,000 on average.
I asked Claymore if he thought there was any relationship. “Lady,” he said, “it doesn’t take a lot of training to kill people.” Which kind of proved my point.
As the conversation wore down, and I could tell the officer’s mind had dawdled elsewhere—the NFL draft was entering its third televised day—I asked, “has there been any evidence that any protestors are bringing weapons to these events?”
He listed a few weapons: 5-gallon water jugs, umbrellas, signs with catchy phrases, bandanas, and slack-lines. “I saw a guitar with a sticker that said, ‘this machine kills fascists.’ That’s dangerous.”