Media Shut Out of Colorado Event Featuring Kyle Rittenhouse

Mark Hertzberg /Pool Photo via AP

Kyle Rittenhouse could have tried to fade into obscurity after his acquittal, though it seems unlikely he'd have been allowed to. Even the idea of his attending college classes virtually is enough to launch protests and hysteria.

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So, it seems he decided to lean into it instead, becoming an advocate for gun rights. After all, he'd have been dead if he hadn't had that AR-15, so it makes sense.

But based on how the media treated him and how it treats the gun rights movement as a whole, I can imagine some degree of animosity. I mean, I feel animosity toward the media and they've never done to me what they did to Rittenhouse.

So their exclusion from an event he'll be attending in Colorado isn't overly shocking, nor is the fact that the media illustrates why they were excluded while kvetching about their exclusion.

A Colorado gun-rights group scheduled Kyle Rittenhouse, a prominent name in the national conversation about firearms, to speak at its fundraising event at the Douglas County Fairgrounds, but the entrance to the banquet bore signs that read: “Not open to media.”

“We’re not allowing any media in the event tomorrow for obvious reasons,” Taylor Rhodes, head of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, told the Douglas County News-Press a day before the June 15 event.

He declined to elaborate on why the organization chose not to let media in.

...

Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, a group that describes itself as a “no-compromise gun rights lobby concentrating on Colorado,” is the Colorado affiliate of the National Association for Gun Rights.

The national organization helped fund Rittenhouse amid his legal case when he “was in trouble,” Rhodes said.

That’s a reference to when the then-17-year-old Rittenhouse shot three men, killing two of them and wounding the third, during a protest over police conduct in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020. Rittenhouse argued that he fired in self defense after men attacked him and was acquitted of all charges.

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Look at how they framed that last paragraph for a second. This is one of those times when they don't say anything technically inaccurate, yet it still paints a picture different from reality.

See, Rittenhouse was 17 when it happened and he did shoot three people, killing two of them. He claimed self-defense and was acquitted, but phrasing it that way makes it seem like he got away with something versus being acquitted in a trial that made it very, very clear that Rittenhouse was, in fact, threatened repeatedly in a short period of time.

There's a reason why he was acquitted.

What was missing was a reason why he was charged in the first place besides political ones.

The media has repeatedly treated Rittenhouse like a murderer who got away with it rather than a kid who was lucky to get out of that situation alive. The reporting on this has created a situation where Rittenhouse is now unable to do much of anything outside of the Second Amendment community, even if he wanted to.

And now they have the nerve to talk about how they're being excluded from a private event featuring someone they tried to crucify?

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No, there's a reason they were excluded. 

What's more, at least some people in the media know it.


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