Kyle Rittenhouse Celebrates Supreme Court Bump Stock Ruling

Gun rights activist Kyle Rittenhouse, who as a 17-year-old shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020, celebrated the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday lifting a Trump-era ban against bump stocks.

“Time to celebrate and buy a bump stock,” the 21-year-old wrote on X on Friday after the U.S. top court ruled with a 6 to 3 majority that the federal government had been wrong to classify bump stocks as machine guns.

Newsweek contacted Rittenhouse by direct message on X on Saturday morning.

The Trump administration had banned bump stocks—devices that replace a rifle’s standard stock allowing the weapon to slide back and forth more quickly and fire more rapidly, repeatedly—in 2018, after the devices were found in several of the rifles used by the gunman of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.

The gunman, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, opened fire on a crowd attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 1, 2017, killing 60 people. He had fired more than 1,000 rounds, according to reports, and 12 of the rifles found in his hotel room had been modified with a bump stock.

However, while the Trump administration’s ban recognized that bump stocks allow a rifle to fire bullets as fast as a machine gun, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that a rifle modified with such a device “cannot fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger,’ and even if they could, they would not do so automatically.”

Supreme Court Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, with Sotomayor warning that the decision “will have deadly consequences.”

Rittenhouse, who in 2021 was acquitted of all charges in the trial over the killing of the two BLM protesters a year earlier, shared a video from the Texas gun-shop owner who brought the case challenging the government ban in front of the Supreme Court.

“I did it. […] I was told over five years ago, why are you going down this road? No one cares about bump stocks, let’s go ahead and let them take the bump stock. But instead I stood and fought,” Michael Cargill said in a video shared on social media.

“And because of this, the bump stock case is going to be the case that saves everything. It’s gonna stop the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] from coming after your braces, the triggers, all different parts and pieces that they’re trying to ban,” he added, urging people to go out and buy a bump stock.

Rittenhouse joined in with the same invitation to his supporters, saying it was time to go and “buy a bump stock.”

Since his acquittal in 2021, Rittenhouse has become a far-right star. He has even launched an anti-gun control nonprofit in Texas to protect what he described as the “inaleniable right to bear arms,” The Rittenhouse Foundation.

The nonprofit promises to fight for gun rights, ensuring “the Second Amendment is preserved through education and legal assistance.”

President Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris have spoken against the Supreme Court’s ruling, together with the families of victims of mass shootings. Writing on X, the Democratic president called for Congress to pass a ban on “bump stocks,” saying that if U.S. representatives send him a bill, he will sign it immediately.