Kent State University graduate Kaitlin Bennett is holding an open carry rally at the university in the fall after gaining Internet popularity for graduation photos in which she posed with an AR-10.
The university prohibits students, staff, and faculty from carrying “deadly weapons” on its campus, but since Bennett has graduated, she is permitted to carry a weapon there, according to cleveland.com. The rally will take place on Sept. 29 and will involve “a great lineup of speakers,” according to a tweet Bennett posted on Friday, along with a link to the rally’s GoFundMe page which has raised $370 of its $3,000 goal so far.
The advertisement for the rally displays Bennett’s gun-carrying graduation pictures and invites people to “Join Liberty Hangout, Infowars, and the triggered millennials at Kent State University on Saturday September 29th as Kaitlin Bennett hosts an open carry rally.”
Bennett has more than 94,000 Twitter followers and has been interviewed by “Fox & Friends” and the Washington Post about her graduation photos. She also received Internet attention after challenging David Hogg, a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting and vocal proponent of gun control, to an arm wrestling match.
In her original May 2018 post, which now has over 9,000 retweets and over 7,000 comments, Bennett posted a picture with a gun strapped to her back, along with a caption referencing four unarmed students who were shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard during a Vietnam War protest in 1970.
“Now that I graduated from @KentState, I can finally arm myself on campus,” she tweeted. “I should have been able to do so as a student- especially since 4 unarmed students were shot and killed by the government on this campus.”
Bennett founded Kent State’s chapter of Liberty Hangout, a libertarian media outlet. The group hosted an open carry walk on campus in the spring which brought out around 40 protesters, according to the Record-Courier.
