Nevada lawmaker thinks it's totally fine to pull a gun on law enforcement—if they draw first

Nevada assemblywoman Michele Fiore likes guns.

She likes them in her christmas cards, she likes them in her calendars, and she likes them in her schools.

In fact, the Las Vegas-based lawmaker is such a fan of the Second Amendment, she thinks it’s just fine to aim a firearm at an officer of the law, so long as they’ve pulled their gun on you, first.

During a recent interview with Steve Sebelius, host of KLAS-8’s Politics Now TV show, Fiore was asked her opinions on the Bureau of Land Management, whose 2014 standoff with the Bundy family over unpaid grazing fees helped launch the assemblywoman’s national profile. At the time, Fiore, a Bundy family supporter, told CBS News that “it’s time for Nevada to stand up to the federal government and demand the return of the BLM lands to the people of Nevada.”

Speaking with Sebelius, Fiore took an even more strident position, calling the BLM a “bureaucrat agency of terrorism,” adding, “they terrorize Americans.”

“We don’t have a First or a Second Amendment right, do we, to point a weapon at a duly authorized law enforcement officer who is just out there doing his job?” Sebelius counters.

“I would never ever point my firearm at anyone, including an officer of the law,” responds Fiore, before derailing what had, until this moment, been a fairly reasonable train of thought:

“…Unless they pointed their firearm at me.”

(It’s at this point I’d like to think Sebelius’ film crew begins to make mental notes of all the nearest exits.)

“Once you point your firearm at me, I’m sorry, then it becomes self-defense,” Fiore continues. “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.”

Of course, it should go without saying that pointing a firearm at a police officer, under any circumstance, is a pretty bad idea. And even Fiore seems to understand, on some level, that an armed firefight with law enforcement is the sort of thing most rational people try to avoid, having acted as intermediary between federal officials and the militiamen occupying Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge earlier this year.

Fiore is currently running for the Nevada 3rd congressional district’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. The first image a visitor to her website sees is her with a gun.