Republican candidate Rand Paul is destroying all 70,000 pages of the US tax code with a selection of weapons

Amid considerable competition, Rand Paul is intent on proving he's the most bats__t Republican presidential candidate out there.

Before the second presidential debate on Wednesday, footage emerged of the Kentucky senator using an assault rifle to shoot up, umm, the Inland Revenue Service tax code.

And yesterday's antics weren't even Paul's first foray into laying the smack down on bits of paper.

To the strains of (firstly) a military drum beat and (secondly) the American national anthem played on an electric guitar, in a July campaign video Paul declared war on federal bureaucracy by killing the tax code with fire.

"Defeat the Washington Machine, Unleash the American Dream," Paul's slogan looms in huge letters behind the spectacle.

In the video Paul promises that if he becomes president all of the US's tax returns will be consolidated into a universal one-page form. He then sets about feeding those innocent pieces of paper into a woodchipper, setting them alight, and destroying them with a chainsaw.

To quote the ineffable Sarah Silverman: "Rand Paul. Republican. Presidential candidate. Pragmatist. Thinker. Knob."

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