“Welcome to my channel,” reads the title of a video uploaded Monday to a channel called “Kyle Rittenhouse” on YouTube. As of early Tuesday afternoon, the channel had nearly 40,000 subscribers.
“Hello! I am super excited to announce I will be starting a Youtube [sic] channel!” said the video description. “I look forward to creating content about guns and talking about the 2nd amendment with all of you!”
Rittenhouse fatally shot two people and severely wounded another during an August 2020 protest in Kenosha, Wis. He was put on trial and a jury found him not guilty last November, WCCO reported. The teen faced several charges, including fist-degree reckless homicide.
Protestors had gathered in Kenosha to protest the shooting of 29-year-old Black man Jacob Blake by police. Following the May 2020 murder of 46-year-old George Floyd – a Black man who former cop Derek Chauvin killed by pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck for minutes – protests against race-related police brutality were held throughout the nation and in some other countries.
According to The New Yorker, Rittenhouse was part of a group at the protest that included an Army veteran named Ryan Balch, who heard about the “Blake protests and decided that he was needed in Kenosha.”
Rittenhouse was described by the outlet as “a talkative teen-ager in a backward baseball cap, with a semi-automatic rifle slung across his chest.”
Amid the protest, some rioters began smashing car windows.
As Rittenhouse passed them, he got into a confrontation with an “angry bald man” who he shot four times.
Richie McGinniss, video chief at the Daily Caller online publication co-founded by Tucker Carlson was the nearest bystander. McGinniss, “removed his T-shirt and knelt to compress the man’s wounds,” while Rittenhouse ran off and called a friend rather than 911, said The New Yorker.
“To those who had heard only the gunfire and the shouting, he must have resembled a mass shooter: they tend to be heavily armed, white, and male,” the outlet said. According to The Marshall Project, there have been more mass shootings in the past five years than in any other half-decade going back to 1966.
Just this year, Uvalde, Texas, became the site of the one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history.
As Rittenhouse left the scene of the first shooting, he was hit in the head, kicked and whacked with a skateboard. Rittenhouse shot the person who hit him with the skateboard in the heart. He then shot another person who approached him in the arm.
Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, died, and Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, was wounded. All three were white, said NBC Chicago.
In the new YouTube video, Rittenhouse can be seen shooting a gun from out of a window, shooting at targets. There is a banner promoting nationalgunrights.org, a group that set up a civil defense fund for Rittenhouse, who is now 19.
He appears with YouTuber Brandon Herrera, who previously posted a video with Rittenhouse titled “The AK Guy and The Kenosha Kid.” Herrera has more than 2.16 million YouTube subscribers.
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