Barack Obama, "Greatest Gun Salesman in America"

[Atypical Liberal]

88. Thank you for proving my point.

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

I don't actually know the origins of those particular games, but I will point out that hockey and football are both inherently violent games as they are, even though no one usually engages in them with the express intent of actual violence.

But you have been provided with many examples of sports that descend from antiquity and are martial in nature. Target shooting with guns. Target shooting with archery. The shot put. Fencing. Jousting. Sword fighting. Any martial art.

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.

And I don't think you'll find a single person who would pretend that target shooting is the same thing as shooting people, either. Thank you for proving my point.

Guns are designed for violence, period.

I'll ignore the fact that there are in fact firearms designed explicitly for target shooting, such as the Anshutz target rifle the Olympic shooter was holding in my "cartoon".

Even if we assume that all guns are designed for violence, this does not mean that guns cannot be used for non-violent activities. Just as bows and arrows, javelins, and swords can be used for non-violent activities.

There is no other use to any end than the honing of that skill in and of itself.

Complete hogwash. You are basically saying that every Olympic target shooter is really practicing not to win a gold medal for target shooting but to hone their skills of violence. This is absurd.

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.

Again, absolutely complete hogwash and you should go to a shooting range to experience this for yourself. Or simply go to a bar and throw darts. It's the same thing - you have to practice the discipline of holding still and controlling and repeating your body's motions in a highly repeatable way in order to be able to consistently strike a target.

This is an exercise in self-control. It is difficult, and it is satisfying to master. It has nothing to do with violence or any culturally ingrained response to pleasure derived from violence.

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.

Well, what more can be said? If you really believe that people who shoot skeet have a sickness of mind bent on destruction, what can I say? You are simply, completely, utterly wrong.

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?

It depends. You can see my ballot in my signature. In the last election all of my Democratic candidates except one had high marks from the NRA. So I voted Democratic for all of them except the one guy with the F rating. In this case I voted for the Republican (Beth Chapman) instead of the Democrat (Scott Gilliland) for Secretary of State of Alabama. I did this directly as a punitive action against the severely anti-firearm Gilliland, who lost his election bid.

But in the last presidential election, I voted for President Obama in spite of his NRA rating because I did not want more war, more corporate pandering, less environmental regulation, less women's rights, more intrusion of religion into government, and a host of other issues why I don't generally support Republicans.

So it is a matter of balancing the issues. But as a general rule, I will actively vote against any politician of any party with an anti-second amendment history.