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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.