Kyle Rittenhouse continued his post-trial media expedition with an appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show. While speaking to the conservative media personality, the teenager revealed that he's destroying the gun he used to kill two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin last summer.
"We're having [the rifle] destroyed right now. We don't want anything to do with that," Rittenhouse told Kirk, according to The Hill.
Rittenhouse also discussed how the gun was used in trial. According to The Hill, the teenage shooter was "shocked" when prosecutors used the AR-15-style weapon as evidence in trial. He told Kirk that he was fearful when the gun was pointed "at the gallery" during the state's case.
"Corey, that's gun safety 101. Loaded or unloaded, treat a gun like it's loaded," he told his defense attorney, Corey Chirafisi.
This is the latest in a series of interviews that Rittenhouse has taken part in since he was found not guilty of murdering two people and injuring a third during a social justice protest in Kenosha following the police shooting of an unarmed Black man named Jacob Blake. In a previous interview with Fox News, Rittenhouse attempted to defend himself by saying that his legal battle had "nothing to do with race."
"This case has nothing to do with race. It never had anything to do with race. It had to do with the right to self-defense," he told Tucker Carlson.
However, many observers have disagreed with his take on the case. News anchors and journalists have argued that Rittenhouse would not have been found innocent if he were not white.
"No black teenager who kills two people and leaves one seriously injured, would be treated, no matter what the law says about self-defense, like Rittenhouse. He would be dead," Eddie Glaude Jr. of Princeton University wrote in a Washington Post column.
“'White innocence' insulates this country from its sins and allows us to live with self-deception. It is the source of an American madness that corrupts everything. 'The innocents' thrive in its illusions and lies. And American democracy suffers terribly, as it always has, because of it."
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