Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) blamed punditry against gun-control legislation for the ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, as well as the mayor’s office itself.
“You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns. Anyone wants to come to my house will be shot in the face. The right to bear arms is my constitutional God-given right and I will exercise that right ’til the day I die. What’s in this letter is nothing compared to what I’ve got planned for you,” authorities released as the text of the letters.
A person of interest was questioned in Texarkana and a home in New Boston, Texas, was searched in connection with the case, CBS News reported.
Cleaver declared on MNSBC last night that the letters “are acts of terror.”
“And the people who sent those ricin-laced letters to the president and mayor Bloomberg and to the office of the mayors are no better than the Chechen brothers who bombed Boston. They are no better than any low-down criminal gangster mob-like terrorist in our country,” the congressman said.
“And what people need to keep in mind is that words have meaning. And before any act of violence, particularly if it’s a public act, they are preceded by words, whether it was the Holocaust in Germany, or whether in our tradition it was a resurrection. Those acts were preceded by words and a lot of people contributed to this because they were making all kinds of statements about the president and mayor Bloomberg wanted to come and take their gun and neither of them said that. But, there are people who can be easily tricked, whose minds aren’t psychologically strong enough to decide for truth from fiction. And so, we see that in what just happened,” Cleaver continued.
“We are the leading nation on Planet Earth and we are creating an atmosphere in this country where we are interested in laying out the most obscene rhetoric, the most volatile rhetoric and we are essentially saying, we don’t care if people have mental disabilities. They ought to be able to get a gun.”
Cleaver singled out Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) as someone who “may know better… but they are feeding it to people who don’t.”
“And we had a lot of people out here who are sick, who are eating this stuff up, who eat this ugly language that we hear up and they do it.”
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