9781422273524

for a significant percentage of American wildlife enthusiasts, tallying about 12 million in total, and accounting for a national participation rate of about 4 percent. The average hunter may spend as much as $2,500 per year on this hobby, which covers everything from licensing fees to equipment. Their expenditures provide about $25 billion in total to the American economy, supporting about 700,000 jobs, with about $1.6 billion in hunting revenue annually diverted to specific taxes that fund the maintenance of open spaces throughout the United States. Interestingly, the hunting license itself represents just a fraction of this spending, amounting to an average of less than one billion dollars total, whereas the annual spending on firearms and ammunition for hunting is ten times this figure. Hunting equipment accounts for more expenditure per year than trip-related costs like travel and lodging overall. The approximately 150 million individual hunting trips collectively account for over 180 million days spent hunting— if you were to average this across all Americans (not all of whom hunt), that’s 12 hours per person per year hunting. Hunting is most prominent in three particular parts of the nation: the Great Lakes states, the Great Plains states, and the southern states in the Mississippi watershed, where participation is as high as 8 percent, double that of the national average. The Pacific states and the New England region have the lowest percentage of hunters, at about 2 percent of the total population. Privately owned land is much more popular than publicly owned land for American hunters, with participation rates of 85 percent and 35 percent of all hunters, respectively. (These numbers add up to more than 100 percent because about one-fifth hunt on both.) Hunting in the United States is also extremely divided by gender, with women accounting for just 10 percent of all hunters, and just 1 percent of women in the country overall report enjoying hunting. Even so, the fastest-growing market in

Guns for Sport

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