Kyle Rittenhouse Shoots Off His Gun And His Mouth Again

There’s a category of people I loathe writing about. They’re newsworthy only by virtue of committing a despicable act or spouting an awful ideology, and they’re happy to capitalize on that infamy by seeking attention at every turn. This is a quagmire for writers: professionalism demands following stories wherever they lead but that often conflicts with a morality and better judgment that abhor feeding search algorithms which reward deplorable attention whores.

Which brings me back to a name I hated typing yesterday, and even moreso today: Kyle Rittenhouse. Two years ago, at age 17, he killed two police brutality protestors with an assault rifle the law said he was too young to carry as he protected a business he didn’t own. Last year, he rode a self-defense argument to an acquittal on criminal charges over the killings. In recent days he was caught lying about matriculating at Texas A&M University—which says he definitely is not—only to change his story and say he was going to Blinn College—which also says he’s applied but is not enrolled—as a “feeder school”. In other words, getting away with killing two people wasn’t enough for Rittenhouse. Now he’s desperate for attention, which he seeks in ever more triflin’ ways. About the time I hit send on yesterday’s story about his Texas A&M tale, Rittenhouse found another way to keep up his George Zimmerman act by trolling a grief-stricken country a fucking machine gun. He tweeted this video:

Rittenhouse rocks an American flag shirt (fake patriots always forget that federal law says, “The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery,”) while spraying a quadrillion rounds from a gun no civilian outside of a Call of Duty session should have access to. In the video game, though, Rittenhouse probably loses because other players are also armed and can shoot back. G.I. Jackass ends the clip smirking at the camera and saying, “Joe Biden, you’re not coming for our guns.” Ok, genius.

Rittenhouse has clearly chosen the path of the irredeemable. Not a full day after he posted the video before he was on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show again, whining about how tHe MeDIa WoN’t lEt hIm LiVe a nOrMal LiFe!“I can’t go to the store. It’s hard for me to go anywhere without security. Doing basic things like taking my dog to the dog park is difficult, so they made it really difficult to be normal,” he said, as host Carlson feigned interest and tried to figure out where his lips went. There’s zero chance he’ll read this since he keeps busy with his studies at Blinn and training for World War III without actually being in the military. But if anybody runs into Kyle Rittenhouse, tell him “normal” people would read the room. They’d know the last thing the rest of the country wants to see as it buries and mourns dozens of innocent people slain by mass murderers with big guns is somebody spraying an even bigger gun and daring the president to take it. The last person they want to see it from is a guy who already got away with killing two people with the same kind of assault rifle that was used to mow down 19 children in a Texas elementary school and 10 Black shoppers at a Buffalo supermarket. Tell him if he wants to live “normal”, he should try acting like it, assuming that’s a thing he’s even capable of.