Outspoken Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore (R) said in a recent interview that Americans maintain the right to point a gun at anyone who takes aim at them—including law enforcement officers.
“I would never ever point my firearm at anyone, including an officer of the law, unless they pointed their firearm at me,” Fiore told KLAS-8 host Steve Sebelius in an interview flagged Tuesday by ThinkProgress. “Now 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.”
Fiore, who is currently running for an open U.S. House seat in her state, played a key role in negotiating the end of the month-long occupation of a remote federal wildlife preserve in Oregon by a group of self-styled militia members. As part of her defense of the anti-government activists, the Nevada lawmaker pushed the false narrative that an armed occupier who was killed by law enforcement in a shootout was “murdered with his hands up.”
Fiore also expressed her distaste for the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency detested by the occupiers at the wildlife refuge, in her interview with KLAS-8.
“They’ve turned into a bureaucrat agency of terrorism,” she said of the BLM.
Fiore is known as an ardent Second Amendment advocate. She’s said she wished she could fly to Europe to personally shoot Syrian refugees and sent a Christmas card last year in which every member of her family, including her 5-year-old grandson, was outfitted with a gun.
Watch a clip of her interview below via ThinkProgress:
