1. Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.
In the case of the shooting examples the idea is to destroy the clay pots or damage the target. Baseball isn't quite on that level. I'm not sure what a gun can be aimed at without intent to damage it.
2. Intense force or great power, as in natural phenomena.
A gunshot definitely feels like an intense force. You could argue it for a strike from a baseball bat but it's quite relative and of course you can strike gently much more easily than you can shoot gently.
> In the case of the shooting examples the idea is to destroy the clay pots or damage the target. Baseball isn't quite on that level. I'm not sure what a gun can be aimed at without intent to damage it.
The point of clay target shooting isn't to destroy something, it's to build a skill and test yourself against an impartial system. That's what Duck Hunt captures and what made it popular. It's why shooting is a sport in the olympics.
Plenty of social reasons too, beyond hunting and self-defense, it can serve comradery and grounding. Some folks practice archery. Some folks fish. Some folks practice martial arts which they hope never to have to use in anger, but which they find calming, centering, and empowering.
> Plenty of social reasons too, beyond hunting and self-defense, it can serve comradery and grounding. Some folks practice archery. Some folks fish. Some folks practice martial arts which they hope never to have to use in anger, but which they find calming, centering, and empowering.
I'm not debating that. I have no moral issue with shooting a clay duck, I just see using explosives to shoot anything as an act of violence. I would say the same about fishing and archery. There seems to be some confusion here about the moral aspect of this, I'm not saying it's anti-social or anything like that, only that the use of guns is inherently violent.
All tools have potential use for violence. Hammers are as good at smashing heads as building houses. Even nuclear weapons have been used for constructive purposes. No tool is inherently good or evil, safe or violent. Those are properties of verbs. Everything is in the application and choices of the user.
Blaming a tool does seem like a convenient way to avoid personal responsibility.
You seem to be making some sort of qualitative argument about weapons (bullets, arrows... fishing rods?) vs non-weapons (baseballs), but I'm not seeing what makes archery categorically different from, say, playing darts, or shot-put (in all cases, a sport involving rapidly accelerating a projectile towards a goal of some kind)