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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.