Shooting with Kyle Rittenhouse
Tiana Lowe Doescher
Video Embed
BENNETT, Colorado — Despite the folks at Kiowa Creek Sporting Club supplying the rest of us with firearms, Kyle Rittenhouse brought his own shotgun to the range. While Rittenhouse was technically a guest of the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, the nonprofit group hosting the unofficial closing celebrations of the Western Conservative Summit, the 20-year-old was really the star of the show.
Nearly three years have passed since the fateful night Rittenhouse shot three men, two fatally, in self-defense during a riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was acquitted by a jury more than a year ago, and now, like other young men his age, Rittenhouse has a 9-to-5 job, a girlfriend, and an apartment. Also like many other young men, Rittenhouse concedes that he is still working on getting proper bed sheets and plates — but yes, he has a bed frame.
CONGRESS CAN DO MORE TO PREVENT MEGAFIRES
Although Rittenhouse has long left the Midwest for a new life in Texas, that one night in Kenosha has never fully left him. The teenager who once dreamed of anonymity and becoming a nurse has now become — begrudgingly, I believe — an ardent activist for Second Amendment rights. He works the conservative speaking circuit not just because of the audience demand, but evidently, because those are some of the only factions willing to help Rittenhouse pay the bills. And financial liabilities, there are many. Although Rittenhouse won his criminal case, he’s still fighting civil suits, one from surviving shooting victim Gaige Grosskreutz and another from the family of Anthony Huber, who died after the incident.
“I really want to grow my advocacy because … I’ve learned a lot about what’s happening in our country and the s***hole we are going into,” Rittenhouse said when asked of his future plans and whether or not they include that nursing aspiration. “I want to raise children one day. I want to raise a family, and I don’t want to do that in the state we’re at, so I believe we need more young people that are willing to get up and fight, people that are going to stand up, talk about the Second Amendment, talk about controversial issues. I’m not afraid to get controversial.”
But Rittenhouse’s answer intentionally excludes, I suspect, a very important reason he’s doubling down on public life — his most vociferous critics simply will not let him leave it.
Rittenhouse was just 17 the night of the shooting, but he had already been working for years by that point to support his mother and sisters. His father, an alcoholic once charged with domestic battery against his mother, wasn’t really in the picture, and the still underage Rittenhouse had transitioned from in-person to online school well before the pandemic to accommodate his work. Every attempt Rittenhouse has since made to return to his education has been struck down by mob rule.
After Rittenhouse attempted to graduate from online classes at Arizona State University, mass student protests were quickly followed by the institution’s insistence that Rittenhouse was no longer enrolled in classes, online or otherwise. Rittenhouse’s subsequent claim that he would go to Texas A&M was quickly denied by the university, and when Rittenhouse said he would attend feeder school Blinn College, the community college insisted he had submitted an application but wasn’t enrolled.
And so, Rittenhouse has wound up at a right-leaning political consulting firm based outside of Fort Worth. At the Western Conservative Summit, Rittenhouse was the main attraction of the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners booth, posing for selfies and promoting exemplary trigger discipline. And on our Sunday excursion, Rittenhouse showed off his shooting precision.
Jeff Hunt, the co-director of the summit, invited some two dozen of us with the promise of a special guest at the shooting range. Dear reader, I am an abysmal shot, but in service to you, the audience, I took my chance. Upon discovering that The Kyle Rittenhouse would be our guest star, I had two immediate reservations that made me wonder whether I should back out of my RSVP entirely. One, how good a shot would Rittenhouse be, and would I want to make a fool of myself in comparison? Second, would it even be ethical to write a piece on Rittenhouse, a boy who is technically (but barely) a man, a public figure who only became so through a tragedy and doesn’t even seem to love being one?
“I’m too young to give advice — I don’t really know what I’m talking about,” Rittenhouse said when my husband begged him to tell me how to aim and fire at sporting clays properly. Later on, and although he understandably rebuffed my overt attempts to interview him, Rittenhouse told me how to correct my form.
“Keep your back leg down and lean forward instead of backwards when you shoot, and don’t fire until the target leaves your eyeline,” Rittenhouse said. “Your shoulder must be in pain, firing like that.”
He was correct, and when I made those adjustments, I was indeed slightly less awful. When I told him that this is why my husband is responsible for the household gun, he laughed.
“Only one?” he said, baffled.
Rittenhouse’s near compulsive desire for self-defense is far from unwarranted.
“Me and my attorney had this conversation right before the verdict was read,” Rittenhouse said. “If [the verdict] is guilty, I’m going to prison for the rest of my life, and he said he gives about six months top before somebody kills me because I’m a right-winger, a far-right winger. That’s what the media says.”
In reality, Rittenhouse remains mum about politics beyond Second Amendment advocacy. Twice, he refused to weigh in on the GOP presidential primary, and while he proudly proclaims he is still a “baby Christian,” one who started a renewed religious journey during his 87 days in jail, Rittenhouse doesn’t expound on “traditional values” or wade into any other cultural war. He openly loathes “Sleepy Joe” for branding him “a white supremacist in a campaign that got over 200 million views,” but Rittenhouse sticks to his lane. Unlike other zoomers canceled before college with Snapchats of singing along to the N-word or sexual misconduct allegations, Rittenhouse’s nearly nonexistent rap sheet reflects a boy compelled to be the man of the family before most children get their driver’s licenses.
Hot in demand, Rittenhouse buzzed around the shooting range in a golf cart. His cheeks, still frankly cherubic with residual baby fat, puffed on a cigar. He seemed to feel more peace on the range and camaraderie with our quiet coterie than he did with hoards of strangers haranguing him back in downtown Denver.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“Stay home. It is not worth it,” Rittenhouse said when reflecting to our small group on the night that Kenosha changed everything. “Hindsight being 20/20, if I would have known I was going to be attacked, I would have to take two people’s lives and shoot third attacker, and then have all the emotional trauma, the court trial, and believe it or not, that was traumatic, being lied about and than smeared in the media; it’s not worth it. It’s not worth being hated as a villain. Everywhere I go, there’s somebody that dislikes me. There are a lot of people that want me dead.”
And as such, Rittenhouse’s life is a bifurcated existence. In Illinois or Wisconsin, he skirts near-violent ire, and in the enclaves of the Western Conservative Summit or shooting ranges, this 5-foot-8-or-so adolescent is lionized as a hero. Gun rights groups are to thank for ensuring that Rittenhouse’s mother and sisters could stow away in hotel rooms while he was fighting his legal battles, and now is not much different. There are ever more bills to pay, and increasingly fewer ways to do it. When I said goodbye for me and my husband to hop on our plane, I knew we were going back to our normal lives. I wondered if he has a normal life these days, or if he ever even had one to begin with.