Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore (R), who is currently seeking her party’s nomination for an open U.S. House seat, said last week that she believes the right to self defense includes the right to aim your gun anyone who aims a gun at you, even if they are a law enforcement officer.
In an interview with a local TV station last Sunday, Fiore attacked the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) as “a bureaucrat agency of terrorism.” Pressed by KLAS-8 host Steve Sebelius about whether she believes the Second Amendment grants citizens the right to point a weapon at a “duly authorized law enforcement officer who is just out there doing his job,” she said that self-defense includes the right to aim back at anyone who points a gun at you first — and to put your own life ahead of theirs.
“I would never ever point my firearm at anyone, including an officer of the law, unless they pointed their firearm at me,” Fiore explained. But, the assemblywoman continued, “once you point your firearm at me, I’m sorry, then it becomes self-defense. Whether you’re a stranger, a bad guy, or an officer, and you point your gun at me and you’re gonna shoot me and I have to decide whether it’s my life or your life, I choose my life.”
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Fiore helped negotiate the end of a standoff earlier this year between armed militia and ranchers and law enforcement officials. The armed group had occupied a federal facility near Burns, Oregon, in protest of the prosecution of two ranchers, who set a fire to their property that spread to land owned by BLM. She has previously pushed the debunked claim that one of those militants was killed by police with his hands up.
Fiore’s record on guns has long been one of the most extreme in the nation. She released a “2016 Walk the Talk Second Amendment Calendar” featuring pictures of herself with large guns. One photo showed her clad in a white dress, wearing diamonds, and holding a semi-automatic AR pistol, with the caption “Diamonds aren’t a girl’s only best friend.” Last year, she suggested that “hot little girls” on college campuses should carry concealed guns to prevent rape. She also proposed the arming of school teachers and administrators to prevent mass shootings.
She has taken an array of other controversial positions that have made national news as well. Though she once operated a home health business, she claimed that cancer is a fungus that can be cured by “flushing” it would with salt water. Additionally, after claiming that “racism is over” at a committee hearing on a voter ID proposal, she identified a colleague as the “colored man to graduate from his high school.”
Fiore’s Republican assembly colleagues elected her majority leader in 2014, but she was stripped of the position when it was revealed that she faced more than $1 million in tax liens.
Update:
In an interview with KTNV on Monday, Fiore clarified that her suggestion that it is okay to point guns back at law enforcement applied only to the “rogue agents” who work at the Bureau of Land Management.
She added that metro police officers are “real law enforcement. “ They “might point a gun at you mistakenly,” she explained, but, that “is okay.”