Rick Santorum

Five GOP presidential hopefuls will be in Iowa Tuesday, but Rick Santorum had Iowa all to himself  today. He went hunting at a private hunting lodge near Adel and bagged four birds.

“There’s only one thing better than getting a bird, and that’s watching your son — in his first hunt — get a bird and he had a lot of good shots today,” Santorum said of his son, John. “We had a lot of fun.”

Santorum’s campaign invited the media to Don’s Hunt Club, private property where hunters like Santorum can pay to shoot pheasants, quail and chukar partridges on the property.  Santorum told reporters he and his fellow candidates are competing for support in the three wings of the party.

“There’s the libertarian primary, which Ron Paul’s going to win, then you’ve got the moderate primary which Gingrich and Romney are scrumming for and then you’ve got three folks who are running as strong conservatives,” Santorum said, “and I think if we win that primary, we’re in pretty good shape.” 

Santorum describes himself as a “steady” campaigner who has now held nearly 350 town hall meetings in Iowa.

“I think we’ll see, in the end, that a lot of folks respect that,” Santorum said.

Congressman Steve King was in Santorum’s hunting party, but King still hasn’t decided if he’ll endorse a candidate before the Caucuses. 

“I want my head and my heart to come together and when that happens and if that happens, I’ll jump in with both feet and I hope it’s not after the ship’s already left,” King said, a reference to the January 3rd Caucuses, “but it could be.”

Last week three-time Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats endorsed Santorum. Santorum this afternoon dismissed the idea he or Vander Plaats may have violated campaign finance rules by discussing the need to raise money to promote the endorsement.

“Some people who didn’t get the endorsement are trying to stir the pot to make it, you know, what it isn’t,” Santorum told reporters. “…I don’t know what he said to anybody else, but what he said to me was about as benign a statement as, you know, ‘This is what we would do with the endorsement and this is what we want to accomplish,’ in a sense trying to tell us how significant that endorsement is in the sense that he would not only endorsement but he would try to do some things to make that endorsement have a bigger effect than just going and doing a press release.”

Santorum bought himself and his two sons new guns — Weatherbys — for Christmas and his son shot his first bird with the first shot out of his new gun.

Here’s AUDIO of the first half of Santorum’s remarks to reporters. Here’s the AUDIO of the second half.

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann says her ”favorite gun” is the civilian version of the military’s M16 assault rifle.

Bachmann is more than half-way through her quest to visit each of Iowa’s 99 counties and during a stop in Henry County late Wednesday afternoon, Bachmann was asked to explain her views on gun rights.

 ”I own some guns,” a man on the crowd said, asking Bachmann: “How are you on the Second Amendment?” 

The U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights includes a Second Amendment which says Americans have the right to “keep and bear arms.” Bachmann told the man and the rest of the crowd in Mount Pleasant that she has earned an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association.

“I learned how to hunt here in Iowa from my dad. I went to gun safety when I was 12 and I  helped Minnesota pass a conceal to carry law,” Bachmann replied. “I have a conceal to carry permit myself.” 

In 2003, when Bachmann was a state senator, the Minnesota legislature passed a law which said that Minnesota officials “shall issue” concealed weapons permits, limiting the discretion of local law enforcement officials and requiring them to issue permits to Minnesotans who meet the minimum requirements. 

During that campaign stop in Mount Pleasant on Wednesday afternoon, Bachmann grew laughter and applause with this admission: “My favorite gun is the AR15 and I’m a really good shot.”

The AR15 is a lighter version of the AR10. While the gun itself weighs up to eight pounds, it gets a bit heavier when the ammunition is loaded.

Today and tomorrow, Bachmann will visit 16 counties. About 100 people turned out for her stop at a bakery in West Burlington on Wednesday.

“Iowa is a word-of-mouth state,” Bachmann told a local radio reporter. “It’s a very personal, person-to-person state and I think the very best way to campaign is positively, on the ground, going from city to city, meeting as many people as we can.”

Bachmann’s first stop today is at the National Motorcycle Museum in Anamosa.

(Theresa Rose at KILJ in Mount Pleasant and Michael Cation at KBUR in Burlington contributed to this report.)