A belated entry here on the subject of bird-shooting as a qualification for being president, for the benefit of those who neglected to buy the Sunday Gazette and read my column on the subject.

Yes, bird-shooting, after the manner of John Kerry, if you remember him, who, the last time around felt the need to go out and shoot a goose to demonstrate that he was presidential timber.

I thought of him when Hillary Clinton reacted to Barack Obama’s put-down of people “clinging” to guns by recollecting that her father had taught her to shoot as a little girl out by a lake near Scranton, which was a biographical scrap that had not previously come to my or anyone else’s attention. Of course it was nice that the lake happened to be in the very state that is holding a most crucial primary.

Annie Oakley is what Obama called her.

You have to be careful about these things. Remember Mitt Romney. Trying to prove his own presidential timber, he boasted that he had been a hunter “pretty much all my life” (that is, his life, not my life), and then it turned out he had hunted only twice.

No good. We need a real hunter, someone who does it just not to get his picture in the paper but because he enjoys it, like Dick Cheney.

Owning a gun, after all, is a hugely important right guaranteed by the Constitution, and I’m often puzzled that in touting our freedom to the rest of the world we don’t talk more about it. Why don’t we boast to Iran or Afghanistan that here in America people are free to own guns and hold ourselves up as an example on that account?

Our presidential candidates always understand it, and I expect that before November a lot of birds are going to pay the price. Too bad for them.