The Center for Biological Diversity tries to ride anti-NRA fervor.
“We eliminated lead from paint, gasoline and toys. It is past time to stop the spewing of some 14,000 tons of lead into our environment every year from bullets. Non-lead bullets are readily available: there is simply no need for recreational lead bullets. There is no reason to expose pregnant women and children to lead poisons in hunted meat. There is no reason to expose communities near shooting ranges to toxic lead dust. There is no reason for 20,000,000 birds and mammals to be poisoned to death every year from ingesting spent lead bullet residues.” [NRAHostage.com]
Maybe!
Well Reality Check – when I was last in the West – only high quality cowboys like Tom Mix used silver bullets. Maybe we need more high quality cowboys?
Well, there is one lead-free bullet that works even better. However, U-238 has its own issues for the protestors.
The up side is they are not calling for a ban on bullets, just lead ones. That still leaves steel shot in a shotgun. (Yes, I know “they” are trying to price the bullets out of consumers’ hands, but that can be overcome by careful budgeting.)
Silver bullets kill vampires, right? Maybe we need more silver bullets.
Well what are they to do ? Give it to the artists? Haven’t they got enough Warhols? Surely bullets are more attractive?
If they want to keep lead out of the environment they need to start by confiscating the 450 million rounds bought by federal agencies this year.
Lead is good – so long as you don’t lick your brush when painting a masterpiece.
OH! Is that why they call it a FARM?
Habeas corpi.
We were told years ago that spent lead shot was killing 5 million ducks/geese a year from ingestion. 5 million, and no one could find a body.
Nowadays you can leave you gun at home; just take a shopping cart to your nearest wind farm.
The lead that causes lead poisoning is soluble lead – lead chemically combined with acetate (Grecian Formula), or the lead oxide (from paint) that reacts with stomach acids to make soluble lead chloride. The Romans got lead poisoning from using lead cookware to boil down grape juice (“must”) into a sweet syrup (“defrutum”) incidentally contaminated with lead acetate (“sugar of lead”). People have lived most of their lives with solid lead particles embedded in their bodies, and have never developed symptoms of lead poisoning.
The situation is similar to mercury, where the dissolved salts are highly toxic but the unreacted metal (amalgam fillings) is insignificant.
The problems come because the mercury/lead ion forms inert compounds with sulfides (nearly every protein in the human body) that get in the way of normal body function, and which cannot be ‘cleaned up’ by normal metabolism or the immune system.
The military investigated lead-free bullets a while back – they don’t work well. Either they are too hard (tungsten) and pass through the target with little damage, or they are too lightweight (silver, molybdenum, and other metals) and get blown about by the wind. Also rifling does not work well on them. Soft and heavy metals (lead, uranium, gold) work best.
“You could get lead poisoning from being shot in the head with a 44 cal bullet!”
It is interesting that they added birds and mammals together; probably to inflate the number. Most people don’t realize there are more then 20 billion birds in North America alone. So the 20 million number is only .01% of birds, but the reality is that when you add in the much larger number of mammals, that percentage shrinks to insignificance. It’s just a guess anyway, built on very sketchy data, questionable assumptions, and unverified models. In the coming years windmills will kill many more birds than lead shot, yet the greenies don’t seem worried about that, the hypocrites.
I contribute to the 20,000,000 birds and animals lost every year though lead poisoning and they taste good.