Gun Digest 2011. Dan Shideler
of the Second Amendment might be most easily broken – not by bans or confiscation, but by taxation. This same year, he was accorded the unusual privilege of presenting two editorials denouncing gun control hysteria, in the June 1 and Dec. 15 issues.
Modern shooters may wonder what all the fuss was about in those pre-Brady days, but Tedmon was by no means raising a false alarm: the national crime wave resulting, indirectly, from Prohibition precipitated a frenzied outcry from big-city politicians and newspapers for more restrictive firearms legislation, particularly the banning of privately owned handguns. Proposals modeled on New York’s Sullivan Law were introduced in several state legislatures, and the National Firearms Act of 1934, banning such mobster’s favorites as Marble’s Game Getters, and “trapper” carbines, became the law in force today. After the repeal of the Volstead Act, much of the clamor for new restrictions subsided – temporarily. Tedmon never again wrote expressly about gun control for The American Rifleman but he remained vigilant about this threat for the rest of his life.
Yet another pet Tedmon theme was the moral obligation of sportsmen to invest time in teaching children the sporting use of firearms: “If you and I don’t teach our boys the love of the rifled barrel...who is going to do it?” His own boys were made test cases with their progress charted in many of his articles, beginning with “Start the Boy Out Right,” in Outdoor Life of July, 1920. “Boys and Rifles” appeared in The American Rifleman of Nov. 1927, and “Rifles and Guns for Little Boys,” was a stand-in for Whelen’s regular Outdoor Life column of Oct., 1935. Both of the latter offered advice for remodeling rifles for shooters as young as five or six. The failure of most draft-age men at the beginning of WWII to possess even rudimentary rifle-handling skills was because their parents had waited for “government social workers” to exercise that responsibility, as he facetiously claimed in “Give Uncle Sam a Boy Who Can Shoot” in the Jan., 1943, The American Rifleman.
OTHER INTERESTS
Tedmon occasionally indulged in a genre of writing that has fallen out of favor since the 1950s, but once enjoyed widespread popularity: the largely fictional comic yarn. “Them Awful Boys,” in the Dec. 1925 Outdoor Life, “Mystery Lead,” in the Dec. 1944 The American Rifleman , and “Precocious Pellets,” in the Dec. 1946 The American Rifleman , are characteristic examples. Modern readers are apt to find these tales rather more tedious than entertaining, but they serve to illustrate something perhaps unexpected about the personality of Tedmon: far from being the humorless moralist which the occasionally scalding vehemence of his tirades might suggest, a broad sense of country-boy humor percolated through much of his work, particularly that of the ‘20s and ‘30s. Refined wit it wasn’t, but rather the kind of good-natured cornpone that made Hee-Haw a hit TV show in the ‘70s. He also occasionally ventured into fiction, as two known examples in Ace-High magazine attest.
Whether because he believed he had said enough, or because his editors thought so, Tedmon wrote less about small deer and sporting ethics in the years after WWII. In five pieces published between 1945 and 1952, he promoted a new (or rather, revitalized) interest – offhand, free-rifle competition, a modern derivative of the Schuetzen matches that had captivated him as a youth but had since died out due to anti-”German” sentiment. The last published work of his known to this collector was, most fittingly, a return to a “favorite” >subject, “The Stevens Favorite Rifle,” in 1959. He permanently left the range on November 28, 1969, at 85 years of age, and now lies among other family members in Grandview Cemetery of Ft. Collins.
Allyn Tedmon originated the tell-it-as-I-see-it, “straight talk express” the first time he put pen to paper; he never mastered the fine art of equivocation. For this reason, his charismatic voice would probably prove unpublishable today, or not, at any rate, without editing so severe as to oppress his distinctive spirit. Fortunately for anyone who cares to sample that spirit, much of his work appeared in Arms and the Man and The American Rifleman, which – because they tended to be preserved by NRA members – remain the most widely available today of pre-WWII sporting periodicals.
PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ALLYN H. TEDMON
| 1902 | “Recommend No. 44 Stevens,” Recreation, July. |
| 1914 | “Differs from ‘Antipop,’” Outdoor Life, Jan. |
| 1915 | “That New Rifle,” Outdoor Life (reprinted in Gun Writers of Yesteryear by Jim Foral). |
| “Horse Play Out West,” Outing, Dec. | |
| 1916 | “Rifle Notes,” Outdoor Life, Feb. |
| 1917 | “On the Trail of the .250-3000,” Outers’ Book, Nov. |
| 1919 | “Random Hunting Re flections,” Outdoor Life, March. |
| “Rifle Notes,” Outdoor Life, April. | |
| 1920 | “The .250-3000 Savage on Big Game,” Arms and the Man, June 1. |
| “Looking Backward,” Outdoor Life, July. | |
| “Start the Boy Out Right,” Outdoor Life, July. | |
| “What You and I Can Do with an Inexpensive Arm,” Outdoor Life, Aug. | |
| “Rifles What Was,” Arms and the Man, Dec. 1 | |
| 1921 | “Small Deer,” Arms and the Man, Oct.1. |
| 1922 | “Lest We Forget,” Arms and the Man, Feb.15. |
| “Hunting the Little Bears of the West,” Arms and the Man, May 15. | |
| “The Fable of a Rifle Nut,” Arms and the Man, June 1. | |
| “There Were Others,” Arms and the Man, June 15. | |
| “Coyotes,” Arms and the Man, July 1. | |
| “The Days of Real Sport,” Arms and the Man, Aug. 1. | |
| “The High Power,” Arms and the Man, Sept. 15. | |
| “Milkin’ Her Dry,” Arms and the Man, Nov. 1. | |
| 1923 | “What Would Pat Garrett Have Done?,” Arms and the Man, Jan.1. |
| “Canis Latrans,” Arms and the Man, Jan.15. | |
| “Ramblings of a Nut,” Arms and the Man, April 1. | |
| “If You Can’t Buy It, Make It!,” Arms and the Man, May 15. | |
| “A Law for the Outlaw,” The American Rifleman, June1. | |