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By Christopher Ketcham

Mr. Ketcham is the author of “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption Are Ruining the American West.”

Regardless of whether they hunt, gun buyers have long underwritten efforts to conserve and restore American landscapes for hunting with an excise tax that manufacturers pay on the guns, ammunition and archery equipment they produce. For the 2022 fiscal year alone, this tax generated a record $1.1 billion, nearly all of it from guns and ammo.

The tax is now facing a challenge, with several dozen Republicans in Congress pushing legislation that would eliminate it as an infringement on the Second Amendment.

Eliminating it would be a good thing — but not for the benighted reasons that inspire conservative ideologues obsessed with gun rights.

Hunters were among the principal users of public lands when Congress imposed the tax 85 years ago, with the passage of the Pittman-Robertson Act. It seemed reasonable, then, to make them pay for their use of the public domain.

But as hunters have become an increasingly smaller slice of American gun owners, it seems reasonable now to ask if they should continue to benefit from a windfall largely financed by gun buyers who don’t hunt. Nearly 19 million guns were sold in the United States last year, a number surpassed only in the previous year, when 21.8 million were sold. Most of these weapons will never be used to fell a deer or duck. More than a few will be used to shoot humans.

Should the sale of a product that today is responsible for so much bloodshed, mayhem, fear and social division be tied to the financing of conservation? These ethical concerns were posed recently by two academics, John P. Casellas Connors of Texas A&M University and Christopher M. Rea of Ohio State University, in the journal Conservation and Society. They noted that the Pittman-Robertson tax has become “evermore bound up with the politics and production of guns, which is itself embedded in broader patterns of social violence.”

The law imposes an 11 percent excise tax on long guns, ammunition and archery equipment and a 10 percent levy on pistols. It was passed in 1937, when American wildlife was in steep decline and efforts were underway to modernize the science of wildlife management. Leading conservationists, including Aldo Leopold, supported it.

The model has gone off the rails, however, because of the collapse of hunting as a cultural tradition.

A survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that 11.5 million Americans ages 16 and older said they hunted in 2016, about 4 percent of the population. This was half the number of hunters in the 1960s. An estimated 28 million people 16 and older, or nearly 9 percent of the population, participated in target shooting; the law also includes funds for the construction or maintenance of public shooting ranges. Moreover, the agency reported that total expenditures by hunters declined 26 percent from 2011 to 2016, from $35.3 billion to $26.2 billion. That includes guns and ammo.

By contrast, between 2011 and 2016, “the most substantial increases in participation” in “wildlife-related activities” involved “observing and photographing wildlife,” which surged 20 percent, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service survey. Unsurprisingly, spending by wildlife watchers rose too, by 29 percent, from $59 billion to $76 billion on equipment and trip-related expenses.

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