Barack Obama, "Greatest Gun Salesman in America"

[ellisonz]

78. "Virtually every athletic contest has its origins in those two occupations."

Prove it. You're telling me that baseball, hockey, football, and basketball is the same as hunting and soldiering? C'mon.

I suppose the interesting thing is that in some cultures certain sport is substituted for warfare. For example, lacrosse, but at the same time, I don't think you could find an Iroquois who would pretend that this is the same thing as hobby. Practiced as warfare the human emotion is the same in lacrosse as it is in warfare but no one is going to pretend that a lacrosse stick is the same thing as a club!

Guns are designed for violence, period. There is no other use to any end than the honing of that skill in and of itself. Your suppose sense of "zen-like experience" in relation to "precision rifle shooting" is culturally ingrained nonsense unrelated to a sense of pure pleasure - rather it is a product of indoctrination. Our society has many unflattering names for those who take pleasure in violence and its means and rightly so, because the idolization thereof is what contributes to the cultural norm that bashing someone's head in is radically different than blowing apart skeet. They are not. They are both acts of destruction and that is not the use of a tool as part of hobby. That is a sickness of mind, a love of violence expressed nominally as pleasure when it really is fetishism.

So let me put it like this: if there was a race with an "anti-rights Democrat" versus a "pro-rights Republican" how would you vote?