An interesting new study by the Outdoor Stewards of Conservation Foundation (OSCF) and Responsive Management doesn’t bode well for the future of two time-honored American traditions—hunting and target/sport shooting.

Dating back to 1985, Responsive Management, with help from organizations like the OSCF, has tracked public opinion on hunting and recreational shooting through periodic trend surveys.

“The latest national trend survey found statistically significant declines in the percentage of residents who said they approve of the activities since 2021,” the report’s executive summary stated. “Specifically, overall approval of legal hunting declined from 80.8% in 2021 to 75.7% in 2024 (a drop of 12,916,901 U.S. residents) while approval of legal recreational shooting went from 81% to 76.4% over the same period (a drop of 11,650,538 U.S. residents). Both decreases are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level.”

The research links America’s growing concern over gun violence with the declining approval for hunting and target shooting—an obviously ignorant link since the two have nothing to do with each other. Still, public opinion is public opinion, and we all know how truth-based that tends to be these days.

The study also yielded some other interesting results, one of which was the constantly changing public opinion about hunting and sport shooting.

“While this project focused specifically on the reasons driving declines in the approval of hunting and target shooting, it is worth keeping in mind that most Americans today continue to approve of the two activities,” the study stated. “However, attitudes are not fixed: Notable percentages of people say they are becoming either more positive or more negative in their views of the two activities.”

According to study results, those who currently disapprove of hunting and are becoming more negative tend to be much more female than male, more likely to be Black of Hispanic than the general population, much more Democratic than Republican, and about the same in age, having children in the household, the residential area in which they live and in education.

Those who currently approve of hunting but are becoming more negative tend to be more male than female (and skew to the older age brackets), less likely to have children in the household, less likely to live in a small city or town, about half Democrat (with a third Republican and the rest unaffiliated), and about the same ethnically and educationally as the general population.

The link to falling support for hunting/shooting and violent crime entered the picture when researchers asked respondents to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 seven different “concerns”—climate change, threats to the Second Amendment, wildlife populations, immigration, food insecurity, gun violence and affordable housing—with 10 being what they were most concerned about. Gun violence came in second at 7.1, just behind affordable housing.

“A substantial portion of Americans have had their opinion on hunting affected by gun violence: 20% say that gun violence has affected their opinion of hunting a great deal or a moderate amount,” the executive report explained. “Further, this 20% of the general population are more likely than any other demographic or attitudinal group to have become more negative about hunting and target shooting in recent years.”

Jim Curcuruto, executive director of the OSCF, said now is the time for action to begin changing the trend and rebuilding public support for hunting and sport shooting.

“There has been widespread agreement that the outdoor community should do everything in its power to maintain and increase cultural acceptance for hunting and target shooting,” Curcuruto said. “But agreement and action are two different things. The time for talk is over. Action, in the form of communicating to the general population about the merits of responsible firearms use, is the best way to improve cultural acceptance. When do you ever see a pro-hunting or target-shooting message in the popular media? It’s on us to change that.”