An open letter to the President

May 26, 2022 Jim Ross Lightfoot Dear Mr. President. I write to you today with a broken heart. As you well know, 19 children and two teachers were gunned down by a mentally ill teenager in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. When you gave a public message of condolence to the parents and families of these murdered young people, I thought you started your comments on the correct note. You were going to be the leader the President of the United States is expected to be. I expected that you would say kind words to soothe our broken hearts and bring all Americans together to understand what a tragedy this mass murder of innocent children and teachers is for all Americans.

Blatant political speech supporting your political agenda Instead, you turned it into a blatant political speech supporting your political agenda. As a Christian, I was also revolted at the times you used our God's name in vain. People in your position are held to a much higher standard than what you demonstrated in your message. In my 83 years on this Earth, I have never heard a President, either Republican or Democrat, speak following the murder of innocent Americans, who dipped to the depths of political crassness you did, sir. It was offensive and totally out of place. If you have any plans to come to Texas and continue your political rant under the guise of sympathy for the dead; as a citizen of the United States and resident of the Republic of Texas, I ask you to stay home. We don’t need political agendas at a time like this. First, we must heal. The next step is to find ways through risk assessment to identify the perpetrators of these terrible shootings before these heinous crimes are committed. Once they are identified, the government could spend some of the money you are sending to Ukraine and other countries around the world that hate us to develop a Risk Assessment program designed to pull together the information available that will tip-off officials that there is a potential problem. That person of interest can then be identified and evaluated.

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Mental illness is the problem. It is not legal firearms. A gun is an inert piece of metal. They don’t jump off of shelves or out of drawers and run into the streets and kill people all by themselves. It is the person handling that firearm that pulls the trigger who commits the crime. You have never been interested enough to come to our state to look at the absolute disaster you have created along our southern border. Should I be more accurate, the thousands of immigrants call them what they are; illegals that wade the Rio Grande each day and flood into our state. In the dark of the night, the Federal Government puts the illegals on airplanes and spreads them throughout our country. Mr. President, this is beyond the pale. Our Border Patrol Officers are overloaded with paperwork and thus not available to protect the border. Governor Abbott is spending millions of Texan's tax dollars to provide security where the Federal Government should be doing it. I will also add that other states have sent people here to help us with the situation. For example, the state of Iowa sent Iowa Highway Patrol troopers to help our Texas law enforcement agencies do the job you should be doing. If you can’t come here to see the disaster your actions have created, as a Texan, I invite you to stay home and not come to make a political spectacle of the terrible deaths of 19 young children and two fabulous school teachers. That is not what real leaders do. Respectfully, Jim Ross Lightfoot MEMBER OF CONGRESS (ret)