To hear Mitt Romney talk on the campaign trail, you might think the Republican presidential candidate had a gun rack in the back of his pickup truck.

“I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I’ve been a hunter pretty much all my life,” he said this week in Keene, N.H., to a man sporting a National Rifle Association cap.

Yet the former Massachusetts governor’s hunting experience is limited to two trips at the bookends of his 60 years: as a 15-year-old, when he hunted rabbits with his cousins on a ranch in Idaho, and last year, when he shot quail on a fenced game preserve in Georgia. ~Newsday

I’ve been shooting once or twice in my time, I have been on a horse a few times in my life (mostly when I was very young), my school had all of us do a five-day backpacking trip in the Jemez, and I have been fishing on occasion, so by Romneyian standards I must be the Great Outdoorsman.

The quail hunting trip might at least work to Romney’s advantage in a very narrow sense, in that he did not shoot any of his companions in the face.