I'm coming from a country where the military don't fire on the population at all, and are never called in to keep the peace... so the comparison is not so far d

I'm coming from a country where the military don't fire on the population at all, and are never called in to keep the peace... so the comparison is not so far different as you might think. Even if our military were called in to keep the peace, firing into the air to scare protesters (a college student protest at that!) into submission is something that would be abhorrent here. So yes, Kent State was a mistake born from confusion, but there's still similarities in using the military and live rounds to control the population. Or perhaps a different moral standpoint: in the same era, look at how the US military treated the very Vietnamese civilians that they were explicitly there to protect. I'm not saying the US is an autocratic junta, I'm just saying the glass houses/stones thing - how can the US be a staunch ally of such a place? Well, because the US is often A-OK with those kind of actions.