Kyle Rittenhouse — who fatally shot two rioters and injured a third in self-defense during a riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020 — posted on Twitter a video of himself firing a machine gun before calling out President Joe Biden over gun control.
In the video, Rittenhouse fires numerous rounds from what appears to be an M134 Minigun while at an indoor shooting range. He then turns to the camera and gives a thumbs up before saying, “Joe Biden, you’re not coming for our guns.”
“Come and take ‘em, Joe,” he tweeted Monday evening.
Also on Monday, Rittenhouse told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he and his legal team plan to “make the media pay” for defaming him in the months after the riot in Kenosha.
“We’re going to make the media pay for what they did to me. They made it hard for me to live a normal life. I can’t go out into public. 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.”
Rittenhouse argued that because several news outlets and social media platforms falsely portrayed him as a murderer, they also impacted his ability to get a job.
Todd McMurtry, Rittenhouse’s attorney, said they are considering a number of defamation lawsuits against news organizations and tech companies, including Facebook.
“Mark Zuckerberg announced in a video tape that what Kyle was involved in was a mass murder and that’s clearly defamatory,” McMurtry said, later adding, “We’re going to sue [Zuckerberg] for the defamatory statements that ‘Kyle engaged in mass murder,’ and for violations of Section 230 by taking down posts that told the truth about Kyle.”
“So, in essence, they suppressed the truth by taking down truthful posts and they did that in violation of Section 230. That Communications Decency Act does not provide that protection,” he added.
McMurtry also noted that while news outlets were in the right to report on the charges against Rittenhouse, calling him a “murderer in certain circumstances can be actionable.”
Additionally, McMurtry asserted that “media personalities” who called Rittenhouse a “white supremacist” made the accusation up “out of thin air.”
“I don’t know how a media can claim that they didn’t make a statement made up out of thin air without engaging in actual malice or most certainly negligence,” McMurtry said. “So I think that we have some strong grounds to proceed. We’re starting to look at all of those, we’re going to evaluate them and look for opportunities to hold the media and to hold tech accountable.”
