Lead Bullet ban? Thoughts

[woody]

Reading the post about lead or jacketed bullets for hunting got me thinking. What will everyone do when lead is banned for hunting ? As much as I hate the thought it’s coming. Already has in some locations.

[nicholst55]

I reckon we'll have to buy and use lead-free bullets of some type. There's plenty of them out there.

[bigbore5]

I hunt my own land. Nobody's business but mine what's banned or not there.

If I take a trip hunting, then I guess I will just have to use an inferior bullet with the possibility of it failing to do it's job on smaller game.

On big game, the copper and bronze solids do work well.

[gnappi]

These proposed lead bans are nothing more than a back door to limiting access to firearms.

The current ban on lead was for shot shells which came about for because migratory bird hunters were "polluting" waterways with "excessive" amounts of lead pellets which birds "could" eat and these pellets "may" get into the water supplies. Steel, and bismuth shot shells shut down the crowd which hoped to stop hunting with their pollution and animal death claims.

Hunting with rifle and handguns presents such a miniscule amount of "pollution" compared to migratory and other bird hunting I seriously doubt claims of "pollution" will force a ban on rifle and pistol bullets, even if they did, there are many lead free options.

Various states have range protection statutes.

rangeservices.nra.org/media/4075/gun-range-protection-statutes.pdf

I'm not too concerned with lead bullet bans.

[dvnv]

"I'm not too concerned with lead bullet bans."

I wasn't either until CA banned lead for all hunting, even varmints. Common sense has little to do with it.

[x101airborne]

Oct 19, 2023 7:37:51 GMT -5 dvnv said:

"I'm not too concerned with lead bullet bans."

I wasn't either until CA banned lead for all hunting, even varmints. Common sense has little to do with it.

Common sense has nothing to do with it. 
Yet these chemical / industrial plants can put more mercury into our waters per MONTH than was ever used in gold mining and fur trade, but they worry about our lead pellets. Then I get to watch well hit ducks fly off with a broken leg after a solid hit that had been lead shot I would be sending the dog to get it. Freakin hacks.

[gnappi]

Oct 19, 2023 7:37:51 GMT -5 dvnv said:

"I'm not too concerned with lead bullet bans."

I wasn't either until CA banned lead for all hunting, even varmints. Common sense has little to do with it.

The tech industry in Florida was more attractive than Cali when i wore a younger man's clothes, I never saw a reason to leave :-) 

[contender]

As noted,, lead bans are just another attempt to severely restrict us hunters. The tree hugging, bunny humpers figured out that in many places,, the numbers of people buying hunting licenses was going down. That meant less opposition to their "Cause!" By using false data,, such as the supposed issue of the Ca Condor eating dead animals not recovered by hunters, and ingesting lead,, causing the birds to die as the basis for their ban, it was passed. Many more eco-freaks in Ca than hunters. And we all know the eco-freaks have the media on their side. So a ban on all hunting bullets was passed.
All it'll take is for them to find an "endangered" species like the Condor,, as the anchor for their "cause" in other places & it CAN happen.

As I like to share with people my thoughts; "You can't fell the mighty oak with one strike with an ax, but many small strikes can fell the oak easily. Our Rights are often struck with little strikes trying to cut down the Second Amendment. Only by stopping the little strikes, AND fighting to prevent more strikes, can we allow the mighty oak to grow & heal."

It's hard to enforce a lead ban when hunting,, UNLESS you are approached by a game warden, and he asks to see your ammo.

I'm thinking if it were to pass,, a carefully mixed copper colored powder coating would be an interesting way to fool the wardens.

[x101airborne]

The wardens actually use a little hand held device that you pass the shell or round through and it detects the presence of lead. But a good idea.

You know what is endangered around here? Tree huggers.

[cas]

I'm VERY concerned about it. I hunt with way too many things that you can't buy lead free bullets for. (and some you can't buy lead bullets for either so I have to make them myself). The state keeps toying with the idea of banning lead on state land. How that would work for me I don't know. I hunt on and alongside state land. It adjoins our property. What if I shoot a deer in our yard and it runs into the state land? Can I stand in the state land and shoot deer with lead bullets that aren't standing in the state land? Vise versa? Do whatever critters we're pretending to protect with this know where the property line is? I wouldn't want them crossing over and negating the whole point.

Do they make soft copper round balls for my muzzle loaders?




There are no California Condors where I hunt in New York. Oh my God we're too late!!!!

[bula]

Not sure about the , plenty of them out there, comment. Sorry. The cost of them is higher now, will go higher when the OWN the market. 

[northerngos]

I’ve been chewing on this for awhile, debating whether it would be productive to say anything. It probably won’t be but I’ve rarely been accused of having good judgement so here it goes.
I want to preface this by saying that I hope this doesn’t come across as preachy, because it isn’t intended to be. I use lead ammo, I hope to learn to cast nice big effective lead bullets for hunting, and I am not criticizing its use. However, as shooters and sportsmen we should have a good understanding of the way we affect wildlife when we engage in our outdoor activities. I also work with raptors for a living and have a fair bit of experience working with other predators so there is certainly an emotional component here in how I view things and how I conduct my hunting activities.
The basics of the issue with our use of lead follow: The big problem with lead use for hunting generally stems from the lead being eaten. Migratory birds and maybe some game birds eat spent lead shot because it looks like a seed, or like grit that they ingest for their gizzard and it became an issue that was measurable and shown to increase risk to threatened species. So now we can’t use lead shot to hunt waterfowl anywhere and can’t use it for upland game in many places. This will never change in our lifetimes. This is all pretty well known. The complaints that tree huggers have regarding lead use for varmints and big and small game are unfortunately valid in reality although their solutions are unsupportable by most of us. High velocity lead impacting an animal usually scatters particles to some degree throughout the muscle tissue and body. X-rays do show that these particles can travel a surprising distance between muscles and organs and under the hide etc. Some bullets are worse than others, so a projectile that is going to retain weight is obviously not going to leave as much lead as something that comes apart like some Bergers and many varmint type bullets. Lead absorption when lead is consumed is also heavily influenced by surface area so lots of little pieces are no bueno. The lead particles and pieces that remain in gut piles are absolutely consumed by wildlife. Scavengers also are well documented to eat around wound channels because that is easier than breaking in through tough hide, so if they eat even a moderate amount when they find an unrecovered animal they eat a surprising amount of lead that way as well. Mammals aren’t as easily harmed by lead consumption but it takes very little lead to smoke a bird in short order. How many animals do you find while out and about that have just rotted and been consumed by maggots? Not very many, because they get cleaned up or picked over before they get eaten and a lot of this cleaning is done by birds. Regardless of how anyone feels about these assertions, these things are well studied and commonly observed and there really isn’t room for valid debate here. And the more research that is done regarding the presence of lead in the blood of wild animals, the more clear it becomes that we have a problem on our hands.
I live in Washington state and spend a lot of my time poking around the mountains. We are fortunate enough to have pretty decent populations of bobcats and cougars and over the years I have found a fair number of kills. Most of these have been whitetail and mule deer but one wild scene in 3” of fresh snow showed in clear detail a two year old moose in a downhill run for his life as a cougar worked out how to get him sorted, and sort him out he did. We bumped him off of the kill by accident before he had eaten much more than a piece of neck, a piece of backstrap, and a hole straight through above the sternum and into the heart. After being heartbroken that I would never see what kind of bad mother of a cougar killed a moose I started carrying a trailcam and placing it on these kills when I found them, to see who had done the deed. The point of all this is that after getting a lot of photos over the years I eventually realized for myself just how many animals can scavenge a kill. The relatively recent case that stands out the most in the way it influenced my outlook was a whitetail doe we found who had been killed by a cougar and cached under a tree. The kill was well hidden, we only found it by cutting the cougars tracks when she ran away from the cache and following them back to where the kill was cached. That doe was almost perfectly buried in the duff under a low hanging dense spruce skirt. Almost no fur was visible even when we crawled under the skirt to look but the needles and dirt were of course visibly mounded. I set my camera and we left. In the week that passed before I recovered the sd card, the following animals came and ate on the kill (the cougar herself didn’t come back for five or six days and I’m not sure it was even the same one though the size seemed a fit for the tracks): mice of unknown species, red squirrels, a monster tom bobcat, a cougar, grey jays, black capped chickadees, black billed magpies, common ravens, at least three individual golden eagles and one red tailed hawk. All of these animals ate on one well hidden cached doe. If she had been shot with a run of the mill lead core bullet many of them would have ingested lead, and that was one kill over a week or so. On the trip in to pick up the card I also found three gut piles by bumping flocks of ravens, magpies, and a couple of eagles. Some of those birds certainly flew away with pieces of lead in their crop.
Because of all this I have made some changes in how I hunt. I stopped using lead core rifle bullets and have transitioned to barnes for hunting with rifles. I still use lead bullets for handgun hunting and muzzleloading, and I pack out anything that I think has a high likelihood of fragmented lead. I also use copper (or for low velocity, copper jacketed) ammo only for prairie dogs and ground squirrels because prairie dog towns and ground squirrel colonies are heavily frequented by predatory birds and they absolutely do scavenge dead squirrels and bring them back to the nest to feed young. These are all just choices I have made, that have become part of my personal ethics. They aren’t any better than the choices that anyone else chooses to make, and I have many friends who hunt who still use lead everything and I don’t look down in them or criticize them for it. I will say this though. Lead use on game and varmints does result in lead poisoning and high mortality rates in birds, period. And this mortality that results from our use of lead bullets in pursuit of game or sport or varmint control is absolutely being increasingly tracked and tallied and studied.  Bird mortality is always hard to measure (think of how many birds you have seen in your life vs how many you have found dead, dead birds seem to evaporate into thin air).  Cheaper, more effective gps transmitters are changing all that.  One good example of this is the golden eagle.  They are widely shown to be in decline.  They are widely shown to commonly have elevated levels of lead in their blood.  They commonly depend on prairie dog towns and ground squirrel colonies during the nesting season and very commonly eat carrion in the winter.  If they ever are listed as an endangered species (which they will be if the decline continues unabated) we can count on no more squirrel or prairie dog shooting in vast areas of the country, no more lead bullets for hunting, probably decreased waterfowling and upland game hunting, and who knows what else.  It goes without saying that the lead issue is already being grabbed and manipulated and taken advantage of by certain special interest groups and used as a tool to try to limit hunting, shooting, and the protections we are afforded by the second amendment any way it can. I think that if we as a whole try to be careful and mindful about how we use lead in the field we may have a chance to curb some of the upcoming attempted restrictions, at least I hope that we can. Otherwise it is pretty easy to see how factual, demonstrable effects that lead can have will be used as a political tool to eliminate its use in sporting applications nationwide, and probably even at the range. The feds don’t have any track record of all of being willing to undo restrictions and rules of this type once they are in place so we can count on any regulation on the federal level being permanent at least for as long as we live.

[jpw480]

Don't take this the wrong way but no room for debate is absolutely horse #$%@# of those three gut piles you stumbled upon. how many were killed with a bow, barnes x bullet, nosler e-tip etc.you are right, all this lead issue is being MANIPULATED.

[x101airborne]

Northerngos, if there ever was an effectively written and validated post on the subject, I think you just wrote it. But you are the first person I have ever read from or talked to that had ANY intelligent evidence to present to the debate. I actually like Barnes bullets but shy away because of the price. If we are banned into non-toxic or monolithic bullets for hunting, self defense or practice you might as well write me off.

Again, excellent post. First one on the subject I have found any thought in.

[jgt]

Have any of the researchers ever documented the uptick of lead in the blood with the area where this is found? All roadways and up to a mile either side of them are contaminated with lead because of its use before being band in fuel. These bird eat things from those areas as well as game from hunting. The amount of lead particles found in animal guts is not enough to produce what you describe. Eating rodents and road kills from near roadways could produce the results you describe. Most bullet that hit game animals pass through. Those that do not usually end up as keepsakes by the hunter. So, I don't buy your claim. I don't doubt you may find elevated lead levels in the animals you are testing. I doubt the source you attribute it to. In rural Texas we have seen a ban on shooting hawk for half a century because of DDT. They are so numerous now they are endangering sheep herds. A little lead poisoning could be a good thing here. When lead was banned from shotgun pellets it caused an over population of water fowl and way more died from cholera than ever died from any lead poison. The truth is the only reason it is coming up as an issue is because it is seen as a back door to gun control. If you check humans, you will more than likely find elevated levels of toxins including lead, mercury, and all the petrochemicals. Not enough people hunt and eat the meat to account for those toxin levels.