President Barack Obama shoots clay targets on the range at Camp David, Md., Saturday, Aug. 4, 2012.

President Barack Obama shoots clay targets on the range at Camp David, Md., Saturday, Aug. 4, 2012.

This is how stupid our political discourse is. In an interview with, President Barack Obama was asked if he'd ever fired a gun and answered "Yes, in fact, up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time."

Naturally, a howl of "PROVE IT" went up from the right and their fact-checking lapdogs, with the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler writing:



The evidence suggests that until Obama had access to a shooting range as president, he never went skeet shooting. He certainly did not speak like a politician who had once used a firearm. But it is also curious that the White House refuses to provide any documentary evidence that he actually used the shooting range at Camp David, since he claims he uses it “all the time,” or that a presidential friend has not come forward to confirm the president’s comments.

The White House has now released the photo above, showing the president shooting a gun at Camp David in August, months before the Sandy Hook killings made guns a major political issue. But wait! Kessler also suggested that a reader's demand for more than one such photo was reasonable. Will this be enough for him?

Also, too, no sooner had the White House released the photo than the right began saying it was suspicious; a Washington Times editor tweeted:



And knowing Republicans and the media, there's a very good chance that kind of thing gains real traction. And while we're talking about whether the president has shot a gun enough times to be able to even breathe the word gun, actual people will keep getting actually shot . So, yeah. Our political discourse, ladies and gentlemen.