The 1937 tax that gun owners backed and that rebuilt America's wildlife

Here's a sentence you almost never hear in Washington: "Please tax us." And here is a second sentence you hear even less often: "The tax worked." Yet in 1937 a group of American hunters, shooters and sporting-goods makers walked into Congress and asked for an excise tax on their own guns and ammunition. They asked that every dime be locked away for wildlife. Congress agreed. The tax is still collected, and the result is one of the quiet success stories of American government.

If you believe, as I do, that the best government programs are the ones where the people who use something pay for it, and where the money can't wander off to buy something else, then the Pittman-Robertson Act is a model worth knowing. It's a tax conservatives can defend, and it came from the people paying it.

The empty woods of 1900

Start with what the woods looked like. Through the nineteenth century, wildlife in America was treated as an inexhaustible resource. Market hunters killed for profit, shipping game by rail to city restaurants and plume dealers. Whole species were shot out. The passenger pigeon, which had been counted in numbers beyond comprehension, was gone from the wild by the early twentieth century; the last known one, a bird named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. The bison, which had covered the Plains, was driven to the edge of extinction. White-tailed deer and wild turkey had vanished from large parts of their old range by 1900. Egrets and other birds were slaughtered for their feathers, which went to decorate hats.

The people who first sounded the alarm were hunters. Theodore Roosevelt, an avid sportsman and later President, and his friend George Bird Grinnell founded the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887, with the aim of protecting big game and its habitat through hunting rules based on "fair chase." The sportsmen's reasoning was straightforward: you can't hunt what is gone.

Congress acted too. The Lacey Act of 1900, sponsored by Representative John Lacey of Iowa, made it a federal offense to ship illegally taken wildlife across state lines, which gave states a federal partner in policing the poaching trade. States passed seasons, bag limits and licenses, and they banned the sale of game, which ended market hunting. By the 1930s the worst slaughter had been stopped. The question that remained was how to bring the animals back.

The 1930s: money, or the lack of it

The answer was not obvious. State fish and game agencies were funded mostly by hunting and fishing license fees, and they were short of money, in a Depression decade when budgets everywhere were being cut. A drought had hit the continent's duck country, and the sportsmen could see the decline in the skies. Licenses brought in some money, but legislators were tempted to treat that money as a general-purpose till and spend it on whatever else a state needed. Nor could the agencies count on general appropriations from Washington; Congress had other things on its mind.

In 1936 President Franklin Roosevelt called the first North American Wildlife Conference in Washington. Sportsmen, conservationists, state officials and the sporting-arms industry attended. Out of that gathering came an idea: take the existing federal excise tax on sporting arms and ammunition, which flowed into the general Treasury, and dedicate it to wildlife restoration. Manufacturers, who might have been expected to fight a tax on their products, supported the idea. The reasoning was the same as the sportsmen's: no wildlife, no hunters, no customers.

September 2, 1937

The bill that carried the idea was the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act, usually called the Pittman-Robertson Act after its sponsors, Senator Key Pittman of Nevada and Representative A. Willis Robertson of Virginia, who later became a senator himself. Both were Democrats, and I mention it only to underline that conservation was never a party monopoly. President Roosevelt signed it on September 2, 1937.

Look at what the law did. It took the tax already being collected, a 10 percent excise on sporting arms and ammunition, and dedicated it by statute to a restoration fund. The Treasury collected it from manufacturers and importers. A federal wildlife agency, today the Fish and Wildlife Service, apportioned it to the states. And the money had to be spent on wildlife restoration, meaning the acquisition and improvement of habitat, wildlife research, and management programs, not on anything else.

The beauty of the design is that it's a user fee. People who buy guns and ammunition pay the tax, and the proceeds go to the very activity that gives those purchases their meaning. Nobody else is forced to chip in, and no general taxpayer is billed for a deer herd.

How the money flows

The mechanism rewards a close look, because the details explain why it has lasted.

The tax is collected at the top. The excise tax is paid by manufacturers and importers, not at the cash register. Here is an illustration, labelled as a hypothetical, at the original 10 percent rate. Suppose a manufacturer sells a box of ammunition to a retailer for $20. The tax is 10 percent of $20, which is $2.00. The manufacturer pays it to the Treasury and builds it into the price. The retailer and the shooter never see a separate line on the receipt.

The Treasury hands it to the states by formula. Half of the money is apportioned to the states in proportion to their land area, and half in proportion to the number of paid hunting-license holders. The formula favors neither big states nor populous ones automatically. Here is a made-up two-state example that ignores the minimum and maximum shares the law applies. Suppose a pot of $1,000. State A has three-fourths of the two states' combined land area but one-fourth of their combined license holders. State B has the reverse. The area half is $500, split $375 to A and $125 to B. The license half is $500, split $125 to A and $375 to B. Add them: A gets $375 plus $125, which is $500. B gets $125 plus $375, which is $500. Each state gets the same total, but for different reasons. That's the idea: the formula rewards states for having wild land to manage and for having hunters to pay for it.

The states pay first and are reimbursed. The program works on a cost-share basis. A state proposes a project, spends its own money, and the federal government reimburses up to 75 percent of the cost. For a hypothetical $200,000 habitat project, the federal share is 75 percent of $200,000, which is $150,000, and the state puts up the remaining 25 percent, which is $50,000. That structure makes states prove they have skin in the game before they see a federal dime.

The anti-diversion rule. To take part, a state must pass what is called assent legislation, committing that it will use the revenue from hunting licenses only for its fish and wildlife agency. If a state raids its license revenue for something else, it loses its share. This rule is the heart of the law, and it answers the problem of the 1930s. The sportsmen paid, and the law ensured the money would stay with the wildlife.

What it paid for

State agencies used Pittman-Robertson money to buy and manage habitat, to survey and study game populations, and to restock areas where animals had disappeared. Those programs helped wild turkey, whitetail deer, pronghorn and elk come back across much of their old range. Public land that hunters and anglers use, and the research that tells managers how many animals the land can carry, are often funded through the program. I'm not going to cite figures for populations or dollars here, because the numbers shift from year to year and you should get them from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and your state's agency. But the pattern is a matter of public record, and you can read it yourself.

Congress also broadened the base over time. In the early 1970s it extended the excise tax to handguns and archery equipment, which recognized how hunting and shooting had changed. Later amendments let states spend a share of the money on hunter education, which teaches safety and ethics, and on building and maintaining public shooting ranges. That last use matters for anyone who shoots without ever hunting. The target shooter who buys a box of ammunition at the range is paying the same tax, and some of that money builds the range.

The companion for fishing

Anglers got their own version. The Federal Aid in Sport Fish Restoration Act of 1950, known as the Dingell-Johnson Act after Representative John Dingell Sr. of Michigan and Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado, set up a similar arrangement: an excise tax on fishing equipment, apportioned to the states for fisheries restoration and management. A 1984 expansion, the Wallop-Breaux amendments, broadened its base to include more equipment and certain fuel taxes connected to boating. The logic matches Pittman-Robertson's: the people who use the resource pay to keep it going.

Why a conservative should care

Here's the argument in numbered form.

1. It's a user fee, not a general tax. The people who buy the products pay, and the money goes to a purpose connected to those products. That's the opposite of the way most Washington spending works, where one group pays and another receives.
2. It was requested by the payers. Hunters, shooters and manufacturers asked for it. A tax that the taxpayers propose carries a legitimacy few others can claim.
3. It sends the work to the states. The money goes out by formula to state wildlife agencies, which know their own land and their own animals better than any Washington desk. This is federalism working as intended.
4. It has a lock on the till. The anti-diversion rule prevents the oldest trick in government finance, taking a dedicated revenue stream and spending it on something else. If only every dedicated fund had one.
5. It aligns incentives. Gun owners are the people with the biggest stake in healthy game populations, healthy habitat and public access, and the law gives them a way to put money behind it.

There is a counter-argument, and it deserves a hearing. Some say a tax on firearms is just a tax on a constitutional right, and that any tax can become a cudgel if a hostile Congress later raises the rate to punish gun owners. That's a reasonable worry in principle. The answer is the law's own design: the revenue is statutorily dedicated, the rate has been set by Congress through the ordinary process, and the gun community has treated the program as its own. A hostile rate hike would collide with the very constituency that built the program. The concern is one to watch, but the record of the program does not bear it out.

You may also hear that hunters and shooters are the only ones who benefit. They aren't. Bird watchers, hikers and anyone who enjoys public land benefit from the habitat the money buys. The people who pay are the ones who agreed to, while the benefit is shared far more widely than the bill. That is a point to make with a smile rather than a grievance.

For more on how the idea of public wildlife fits with the rest of our conservation tradition, see seven myths about hunters, guns and the wildlife they pay to protect and Six Myths About the Republican Record on Conservation and the Environment. For the other side of the farm and ranch ledger, Who Owns the Range? Grazing Permits, Allotments and the Rancher's Real Rights covers public lands and who may use them. And if you wonder what it means that a gun can be a conservation tool, remember that the same hobby that the Second Amendment protects, described in What the Second Amendment says, read one clause at a time, has been quietly paying for the woods for nearly ninety years.

The bottom line

• Pittman-Robertson is a tax gun owners asked for. Signed September 2, 1937, it dedicated the excise tax on sporting arms and ammunition to wildlife restoration.
• It's a user fee with a lock on it. Buyers pay, states receive the money by formula, and the anti-diversion rule keeps license money with the wildlife agency.
• The states do the work. Washington collects and apportions; state agencies decide how to spend, and they pay part of the cost.
• Gun owners are conservationists in practice. Every box of ammunition and every new rifle carries a share toward habitat, hunter education and ranges. Say so next time someone claims gun owners take from nature and give nothing back.
• Get the numbers from the source. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and your state wildlife agency publish what the program pays for. Look it up, then tell a neighbor.