The Gun Is Good

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Nevada Assemblywoman, congressional candidate, and all around gunstrumpet Michele Fiore has been thinking long and hard about what freedom means, and what freedom means to her is apparently the inalienable right to get yourself blown away by cops if you actually follow her completely sane advice about what you ought to do if a law enforcement officer draws a gun on you: You just go right ahead and take a bead on them, as it is your God-given right to self-defense yourself! Not that we're constitutional scholars or sovereign citizen legal experts or anything, but this sounds inadvisable to us, possibly because we aren't professional gun-humping morons.

In an interview with Las Vegas teevee station KLAS, Fiore explained to host Steve Sebelius that the 2014 Bundy Ranch StandoffPalooza proved to her that the Bureau of Land Management has "turned into a bureaucrat agency of terrorism. They terrorize Americans."

Sebelius countered that there's no First or Second-Amendment right to "point a weapon at a duly authorized law enforcement officer who is just out there doing his job," at which point Fiore interrupted him to set him straight on the facts as she sees them (i.e. through a lens that says gun fanatics love me and will vote for me):

I would never, ever point my firearm at anyone, including an officer of the law. Unless they pointed their firearm at me. Now, once you point your firearm at me, I’m sorry, then it becomes self-defense. So 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.

We realize the video cuts off right as she's saying "I choose my life," so we checked the full video to see if there was a follow-up question in which she offered some thoughts that didn't sound like a recipe for getting yourself killed by a police officer. Nope. Sebelius's next question was about Fiore's (considerable) tax troubles. Way to follow up there, local reporter!

Now, strangely, earlier this year when she was negotiating an end to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge standoff, Fiore did not encourage the last four holdouts to point their guns at the Feds, who had them outnumbered and in their sights. She talked them down and got them to surrender, instead of indulging their fantasies of martyrdom. Had Fiore encouraged them to do exactly what she's advocating here, there'd have been a body count. Then again, that was in a real life or death situation, not in the much more comfortable and vote-getting fantasy world of the wingnut gun-humper, who has an absolute right to stand for Liberty, even if some jackbooted federal thugs need to die.

Honestly, no one should be too surprised that Fiore would return, in campaign season, to her gun-oil-lubricated dreams of Armed Patriots standing up to the evil Feds; she said as much back in 2014 during the first Bundy shitshow, when she approvingly explained the militia jackholes who'd flocked to the Bundy ranch were the finest available examples of Armed Resistance to an Out Of Control Federal Government. At the time, she explained it was perfectly appropriate, telling MSNBC's Chris Hayes that the federal government shouldn't "come here with guns and expect the American people not to fire back." Funny how she's a lot more willing to talk about shooting back at law enforcement when it's a purely hypothetical proposition.

Or, hell, maybe she's actually a deep-cover false-flag federal agent provocateur who's encouraging militia morons to draw their guns on police, so they'll be wiped out before they can effectively mount an armed resistance to Obama's coming declaration of martial law? Maybe we'll call Alex Jones and suggest that.

Nah. She's just a fucking idiot who knows she can say any goddamn thing favoring guns and the rubes will vote for her.

[Think Progress / KLAS-TV]