On January 7th, 2019, Kaitlin Bennett visited Pittsburgh to take part in the open carry rally to “protest Mayor Peduto’s tyrannical gun control.” The mayor and much of the population of Pittsburgh are considering multiple new regulations that would restrict semi-automatic weapons and accessories within the city limits.

Bennett not only took part in the rally; she then went on to post (multiple) tweets about being in Pittsburgh and why she was here. One tweet included how “it’s pretty cool to be able to carry my AR-15 rifle in a city.” Well, the city in which she is referring to is one that is still in shock and disarray after a “AR-15 resembling” rifle tore apart lives and families from a mass shooting back in October. Robert Bowers, 46, open fired in the Tree of Life Synagogue on the morning of Saturday, October 27th. 11 people were killed, and 6 were injured, including 4 police officers.

Bennett legally had a right to attend the rally, just like everyone else who attended. However, morally, it was not right for her or anyone else to rally for gun rights less than three months after the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting. The rally did start with a minute of silence for the victims … a whole 60 seconds. That does not make up for the fact that she is taking time out of her day to prove that she should be able to openly carry something that killed 11 innocent human beings. It was also completely unnecessary for Bennett to post about it on social media like she did.  Her motive for these tweets was for just about everything else she does: for attention. In my opinion, she is just so incredibly uneducated she probably didn’t even think about how her words may affect the people in this city.

No matter what she and the rest of the protesters believed to be the issue — guns or no guns — they should not have been rallying about the very thing that created a mass murder in the same city. Pittsburgh has not recovered yet, and it was wrong to do something like this so soon and so publicly.