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The surprising reason why buying guns helps endangered species

And why wildlife agencies are building so many shooting ranges.

Here’s a weird fact: Every time someone buys an assault weapon in the US, such as an AR-15, they’re funding wildlife conservation. The same is true if they purchase a handgun, a shotgun, or any other kind of gun or ammunition.

That’s thanks to a law most people have never heard of: the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act, commonly known as the Pittman-Robertson Act. Passed by Congress in 1937, the law channels revenue from a tax on firearms, ammo, and archery equipment to state wildlife agencies — government organizations that restore wildlife habitat, monitor threatened species, and oversee hunting and fishing. Levied on firearm manufacturers and importers, the tax is 11 percent for long guns and ammunition and 10 percent for handguns, and it sits on top of other common taxes.

Over the last decade, the law has channeled close to $1 billion a year into state wildlife agencies across the country, amounting to a substantial share of their budgets. One recent analysis found that Pittman-Robertson made up about 18 percent of state agency budgets, on average, in 2019. (License fees for fishing and hunting, along with a hodgepodge of other revenue streams, including a similar tax on fishing gear, make up the rest.) And revenue from Pittman-Robertson has been increasing, roughly doubling in the past two decades — in no small part because gun sales have surged.

An obscure law from the 1930s channels money from an excise tax on firearms and ammo into state wildlife agencies.

Revenue from this tax makes up almost a fifth of these agencies’ budgets on average.

Some scholars and environmental advocates worry that funding conservation with guns is morally problematic and creates perverse incentives for state agencies to promote firearm use.

Yet, these agencies already face severe funding shortfalls, and losing revenue from this gun tax would likely be disastrous for wildlife.

Even with this tax in place, state wildlife agencies need more money to conserve the increasingly long list of endangered wildlife within their borders.

Despite the dedicated tax revenue, wildlife agencies are still chronically underfunded. They oversee the bulk of the nation’s imperiled species — which now comprise more than one-third of all plants and animals in the US — and threats to biodiversity like climate change are only getting worse. These agencies need all the money they can get.

As a result, “wildlife agencies have a clear incentive to increase firearm use if they want to sustain themselves,” said John Casellas Connors, a researcher at Texas A&M University and one of the leading experts on the Pittman-Robertson Act. “There’s a desire to increase access to opportunities to shoot, to ensure that people keep buying guns and using guns.” Indeed, the purchase of firearms of any kind helps pay for staff, wildlife monitoring, and many of the other conservation tasks they do.

This raises an important question: Is it okay to fund conservation with tools of violence?

Fewer hunters, more guns

The link between conservation and guns is as old as the modern conservation movement itself. For a long time hunters were the movement.

In the late 1800s, elite and influential sportsmen like Theodore Roosevelt raised concerns about vanishing wildlife — deer, elk, bison, waterfowl, and other game species they liked to hunt. Ironically, rampant, unregulated hunting for profit is what threatened these animals in the first place. Around the turn of the 20th century, for example, market hunting drove now-abundant white-tailed deer populations close to extinction, and similarly eliminated all but a few hundred bison.

These animals can cause big trouble. Why are states unleashing them by the millions?

As much as Roosevelt and his peers recognized hunting as a problem for wildlife, however, they also saw sportsmen as conservation champions.

“In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only........

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