Gun Digest 2011. Dan Shideler

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      Stevens was an early advocate of telescopic sights, especially when they were mounted on Stevens single-shots.

      “Sighting ‘Small Deer’ Rifles,” following in the August issue, was a plea for small-game riflemen to recognize the futility of obtaining a clear aiming-point with metallic sights on targets so small as to be obscured by the blade or bead of a front sight. “Nothing less than a good telescopic sight is fit to put on a really good ‘small deer’ rifle.... You can’t afford not to have one.” This argument correlated perfectly with two other favorite themes: the fine value represented by Stevens scopes relative to others selling at twice the price, and the ethical hunter’s moral imperative to strive to avoid crippling, “the agonies of gunshot fever.”

      The latter consideration became his principal thesis in the final part of his 1931 The American Rifleman trilogy, “Rim Fires and Game,” in the November issue. The object of that theme was the .22 RF cartridge, which Tedmon passionately insisted was the single greatest contributor to unnecessary suffering among small game of all varieties. “I know that many squirrels are killed with the .22 LR; on the other hand, many...crawl away wounded to die a lingering death not due these game little beasts.” That he was speaking from bitter personal experience he did not conceal: “During those thoughtless and heartless days of a man’s life, I shot dozens of prairie dogs with the .22 LR. Today I get little pleasure and plenty of regret when I recall how many were hit, only to crawl gamely into the burrow to die, victims of my thoughtlessness.”

      ETHICAL CONCERNS

      Extreme as Tedmon’s feelings may seem to contemporary readers, he was by no means alone in holding such views: “I have for years joined with Col. Whelen and others in condemning the .22 RF for shooting game; that is, anything larger than rats...English sparrows and the like.” In the August 1, 1922, issue of Arms and the Man, sightmaker “Trim Nat” (Tom Martin) enlarged upon this point: “Why will some men insist that the .22 LR hollow-point is amply large enough for such game [woodchucks]? It is not, and it is only trade selfishness and cruelty to advocate its use. The main effort is to sell the .22 LR as being just the thing for woodchuck hunting.”

      But who would be so irresponsible as to make such a claim? A U. S. Cartridge Co. advertisement of the period confirms that these rimfire critics were not setting up straw men to knock down. Arms and the Man, in the March 1, 1920 issue, published a claim by Ozark Ripley, a very well known sporting writer into the 1950s, of clean kills with .22s on geese, turkey, deer, and a timber wolf. Plenty more of the same foolishness can be found by anyone who cares to review the literature of this period. Clearly, hyperbolic advertising, aided and abetted by the fatuous braggadocio of accomplices in the sporting press, promoted the abuses that inflamed Tedmon and others who took seriously their ethical responsibilities as hunters.

      Discouraging the use of .22 RFs for hunting (but not, of course, for practice and target shooting) was but half of “Rim Fires and Game”; the other half was a ringing endorsement of Tedmon’s ideal small-game rimfire, the Stevens .25 Long. “After having spent a lifetime shooting at small game and seeing it murdered by others, I can only repeat what I have said time and again before: the .25 RF is by far the best small game rim fire cartridge we have today.” Such sentiments were echoed by almost everyone who wrote about this cartridge, including Whelen (“the only rim-fire to use for hunting”), but everyone complained of its unreasonable cost: well over twice the price of .22 LRs. “There is your answer,” explained Tedmon; “Humanity is a hollow term where the average man’s pocketbook is involved.”

      For his own use, Tedmon inclined toward the .25-20 Single Shot, experimenting with loads that stretched the potential of this venerable round, but his words in this piece were aimed at the great mass of casual shooters who did not reload. It should go without saying, moreover, that he was not addressing himself to small-bore riflemen in the class of Charles Landis, who hunted with match-grade rifles and target scopes and whose marksmanship and skill in range estimation were fruits of a lifetime of practice and study of the technical minutiae of their sport.

      No Ph.D. in psychology is needed to trace the origin of Tedmon’s unusual compassion for small game animals. Repeatedly, as if in contrition, he lays bare harrowing memories: “I emptied the magazine [of a M1906 Winchester] into that badger. . . . He probably lingered for a day or more, suffering untold pangs of death, while I, brainless yap that I was, rode off forgetful of it all.” That act of thoughtless cruelty seared itself into his memory, and helps to explain later outbursts of vitriol, such as this passage from “Mountain Marmot Stalking in Colorado in Sports Afield, July, 1936: “For those sportsmen who must kill, kill, kill, I recommend a job on the killing floor of a slaughter house.”

      SECOND AMENDMENT ACTIVIST

      Game hogs, slob hunters, and fools misled by advertising into believing their four-pound .22 repeaters were good medicine for 250-yard varmint hunting were perennial targets of Tedmon’s invective, but another menace loomed larger in his consciousness as the century wore on: “the white-livered busybodies” agitating “to take this right [to keep and bear arms] from us.” This impassioned warning about legislative assaults on the Second Amendment was delivered in “What Would Pat Garrett Have Done?” in the Jan. 1, 1923, Arms and the Man. In the June 1 issue (following the renaming of the publication as The American Rifleman), “A Law for the Outlaw” predicted with farsighted imagination how the back 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 СКАЧАТЬ