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Topics: Kyle Rittenhouse, US News
Joe Harker
Kyle Rittenhouse wants to get back the gun he used to fatally shoot two people and wound another during a Black Lives Matter protest.
The shooting occurred in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 25, 2020, and Rittenhouse turned himself over to the police hours later in his hometown of Antioch, Illinois.
Rittenhouse's trial split America; conservatives rallied to his side following his arrest to claim he was protecting Kenosha from rioters, while progressives accused him of being a gun-toting vigilante who travelled to another state and shot three people, leaving two of them dead.
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The teenager said he travelled to Kenosha with his gun to protect property during the protest and claimed he shot three people in self-defence, a jury acquitted Rittenhouse of five charges in November 2021, including first-degree intentional homicide.
Now, Rittenhouse wants to get his gun back, along with several other items which were confiscated from him upon his arrest, Insider reports.
Those items include ammunition and a magazine for Rittenhouse's rifle, a phone, a face mask, a $1 bill and the clothes he was wearing on the day of the shootings.
The 19-year-old's lawyer has filed a motion with Kenosha County Circuit Court for the return of his belongings, and Rittenhouse has said he intends to destroy the rifle so that it can't be used to celebrate the shootings he carried out.
Rittenhouse family spokesman David Hancock said: 'At the end of the day, two people did lose their lives, period. That weapon was involved in that. That weapon doesn’t belong on a mantle. It doesn’t belong in a museum. It belongs where Kyle wants it, and Kyle wants it destroyed... There’s plenty of people out there who would like to hold these items up, on both sides. That’s nothing Kyle’s interested in.'
The gun was an AR-15 style rifle, the Associated Press reports, and was purchased for the then 17-year-old Rittenhouse by his friend Dominic Black as Rittenhouse was legally unable to buy a gun.
The money used to buy the gun came from Rittenhouse, and the motion for the court to return it to him states that Black intended for it to become his legal property when he turned 18.
Black was himself arrested in 2020 and charged with two counts of delivering a dangerous weapon to a minor resulting in death, earlier this month he pleaded guilty to two citations for contributing to the delinquency of a minor for which he was fined $2,000.
A court hearing on the motion to return Rittenhouse's items is scheduled for January 28.
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