Firearms Excise Tax
Support for reform is growing. This is one that bugs me. Shooters, being hardware people, spend more to fund hunting. Hunters spend less. Seems that tax should be on hunting licenses instead. Or, my preference, shouldn’t exist at all.
June 10th, 2010 at 8:14 am
I don’t have a problem with the excise tax if it’s used properly and we, as hunters and shooters, have to make sure it’s used properly.
I’m forever calling my legislators and asking them where they’re spending my excise tax money. Pittman-Robertson funds are returned to the states and one of the legislated uses is to fund shooting ranges and shooter education.
The fact that we pay for our own sport (and it’s one place where tax revenues increased last year) gives us leverage with the lege’s and the DWF folks.
On the other hand, less taxes is good too, but this is one tax that I don’t really have a problem supporting as long as it’s used correctly.
June 10th, 2010 at 9:15 am
So poll taxes are unconstitutional, but taxing the right to self defense is OK?
I quit looking for any consistency in government edicts long ago, but when the inconsistency gets too obvious, I still wonder what they’re drinking in DC.
June 10th, 2010 at 8:29 pm
I think we, as a community, need to do a better job of advertising this tax for our own benefit. We should have an ad campaign out there… “Mountain bikers, backpackers, ATV-riders, birders, and hikers: Thank a local shooting club! Their contributions paid for X miles of trail restoration in your backyard this year!”
It would be an excellent way to help move those sorts of recreational outdoor users from the “green” Sierra Club type camp into the big tent shooting sports umbrella. If you look at the numbers, shooters are responsible for way more wildlife conservation and funding for outdoor public recreation areas than any of the “green” groups.
But I doubt that even most shooters know anything about “Pittman-Roberts,” much less anyone outside the community. Terrible PR job on our part.
June 10th, 2010 at 8:57 pm
We really talk up big the benefits of the Pittman-Robertson excise tax when we do hunter education here. And we talk up that the excise tax itself was the idea of sportsman.
I find it discouraging to see people slam it here.
June 11th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
SPQR,
Well, since the benefits that have ANYTHING to do with shooting tend to be overwhelmingly slanted towards “hunters”, while teh overwhelming majority of teh funds collected are from shooters who aren’t hunters, you can perhaps understand why.
When it was passed, most shooters WERE hunters. But most of the avid hunters I know (live in a rural county) haven’t bought a new gun in 10 years or more.
My wife has bought a gun on average once every two years. And has never hunted, and only ONCE has used a public range (which was then closed to handgun shooters and and shooters looking for range time reserved for hunters ONLY, so they could confirm their zero or function check).
Again, if the spending breakout is going to be so heavily slanted towards the MINORITY of shooters, who also tend to spend less in excise-taxable stuff than teh majority who don’t hunt, there is going to be some resentment. Change the excise tax over to something that pertains exclusively to HUNTERS (like hunting licenses), and I have no objection if the spending is given exclusively to hunting related stuff.
Then there is the group that feels that taxing an enumerated Constitutional right is wrong. (I always point out that authors and journalists still pay income taxes, and papers aren’t free of sales tax in most states. But I see their point.) Owning arms is such a right. HUNTING is not. (Oh, the Founding Fathers would be flabbergasted if they were around in some future where hunting was outlawed on public lands altogether and heavily restricted on private lands, but it ain’t an enumerated right. Any RIGHT to hunt is one of those “prenumbra” deals, if it exists.)