"I wonder if he's stacking the deck."
"I assure you, the cards are sufficiently randomized."
(Name the episode for a cookie!)
--------
OK, that bit of silliness taken care of, I wanted to make two notes:
Pile shuffling does not randomize the cards. It introduces exactly zero randomness, and maintains a significant amount of information even from round to round. I may be wrong, but I seem to recall that for N cards piled into M piles, as long as N mod M = 0, there is some number X of pile shuffles for which the original arrangement of cards will be reproduced, with that X related somehow to N/M. Similarly, perfect riffle shuffling introduces no randomness. In both cases, the processes are reversible as well. Claiming either of these is random is equivalent to claiming you're happy if your password is stored in a database as a Caesar cipher.
On the gun analogies: Y'all realize there are charges other than murder and attempted murder, right?
If I point an unloaded gun at you and say I'm going to shoot and kill you, that's aggravated assault, and a cop is going to take me down even though my statement is impossible.
If I tell you loudly that I'm going to go home, get my gun, return and kill you, then a cop would be within his rights to detain me for assault even if I have no gun at home. A similar threat to kill, despite a lack of actual means, constitutes assault.
Attempting to influence the order of cards beyond what's explicitly allowed by the rules is cheating, whether successful or not. Moving the cards around due to "superstitions" is stalling at best (assuming you shuffle as thoroughly as a computer) and cheating at worst. Just... you know... don't do it. Is it that hard?