A third letter stating a death threat and possibly containing ricin poison was intended for President Barack Obama and bore the same postmark as two similar letters sent to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg last Friday and this Sunday. Both the president and the mayor favor stiff gun control laws.
The anonymous letters to Bloomberg were opened in New York on Friday at the city’s mail facility in Manhattan and on Sunday at the Washington office of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group that Bloomberg founded.
The letters bore the postmark of Shreveport, Louisiana, according to CBS.
Secret Service director Edwin Donovan said, “The White House mail screening facility intercepted a letter addressed to the White House that was similar to letters previously addressed to Mayor Bloomberg in New York.
“This letter has been turned over to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force for testing and investigation.”
At least one of the letters to Bloomberg stated, “You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns. Anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face. The right to bear arms is my constitutional, God-given right and I will exercise that right till the day I die. What’s in this letter is nothing compared to what I’ve got planned for you.”
Mayor Bloomberg said that one of the letters “obviously referred to our anti-gun efforts, but there’s 12,000 people that are going to get killed this year with guns and 19,000 that are going to commit suicide with guns, and we’re not going to walk away from those efforts.”
The people who opened the letters were not harmed by the poison, but three police officers who examined the letter to Bloomberg felt minor symptoms. Ricin is a poison that is easily produced because it can be found naturally in castor beans.
If ingested, it can cause breathing difficulties, vomiting, internal bleeding and liver and kidney failure, leading to death.