Ohhhhh
It all makes sense. The irrational anger, lack of morality, and loss of common sense.
A loss would imply they had any to begin with
Personally, I just never really thought about it. Mostly what you touch is the brass case anyway. I wash my hands pretty frequently, but that’s not always an option in the woods.
They touch each other, lead dust from rattling around, the gasses, etc. There’s a lot.
And when you actually find out how incredibly little it takes, accumulatively, and that it stays with you basically forever… Handling lead in any capacity is bad stuff. It’s very very toxic.
Imagining people breathing it and handling it and having it around your home and on your clothes. It starts to paint a picture… A lead picture.
I recommend de-lead wipes for a range bag mainstay. Works as a moist towlette even when you aren’t shooting.
Are they unscented?
The Hoppes brand ones are either unscented or so mild that I don’t smell anything.
I never thought to check, bit you could probably find some that are; hunting communities would be the place to look for that, I’d think.
True but maybe stop killing shit
Hunting is literally the most ethical way to consume meat.
… That’s… I’ve never thought about it that way.
What about ethical for the farmer/hunter?
And what about lab-grown meat? We aren’t totally there yet, but it could have big implications for the meat industry.
To be fair, they could just go out there for target practice and shoot soda cans or something
Which is usually what I’m doing. I only shoot living things if I intend to eat them and that’s pretty rare.
How can I kill shit? It’s already dead.
Maybe yours is
If your shit is alive you should probably see a doctor.
My shit is a doctor.
Now there’s a party trick!
Not washing up after shooting seems insane to me. My range even has warnings posted about washing your hands and not eating or drinking. There’s even a sink in the back!
The amount of new shooters who aren’t taught about proper range safety, including lead exposure management, is pretty high. No one told me when I started, and many people act like I’m weird for caring.
Oh so THAT’S where MAGA got the brain damage.
This implies they actually train with their firearms instead of just cosplaying with them. There must be another source.
Nah they like shooting cans.
Ya know. Mexi-cans, Domini-cans, Puerto Ri-cans?
It honestly explains so much
The sad part is that it’s not that hard. No food or open drinks at the range, wash your hands/forearms with lead removal soap, change and toss your clothes/gloves into the washer with lead removing detergent. It’s a ritual my household performs whenever we finish shooting and it means my preferred range clothes and gloves are always clean for the next visit.
Lead removal soaps and detergents are affordable and abundant. If you’re exposed to heavy metals either through shooting or work then pick a few up.
Edit: also lead removal wipes! Super convenient when you’re somewhere without water for washing. They come individually packaged as well.
Jesus, am I supposed to be doin all that shit after soldering with leaded solder? I just wash my hands with regular ass soap like I just pooped.
I don’t when I solder. But I do use lead removal soap and/or wear gloves. Washing my hands after soldering doesn’t take much time and I figure it’s better safe than sorry.
The issue with shooting is rarely bullets, like people think, it’s the primers. Most primers contain heavy metals that get blasted out into the air, which means you end up with a nice microscopic coating of the stuff on your skin and clothes. Touching lead probably isn’t an amazing idea but won’t do much unless you’re, like, chewing on it. But microscopic particles are a different story.
Well you should be washing your hands, and using lead removal soap or washing probably wouldn’t be a bad idea
But with soldering, unless you’re doing something really wrong, you’re not really going to be spraying lead around the room, to settle on your clothes and such and your soldering iron or even a standard blowtorch torch isn’t anywhere near hot enough to vaporize lead, so inhalation isn’t really a risk (to say nothing about fumes from your flux or whatever else you might end up burning, good ventilation is still a very good idea) and hopefully you’re not soldering on any kind of food prep surfaces.
With shooting, there’s a lot more risk of airborne particles and bullet fragments and such as well as fumes from lead based chemicals in the primers, so lead kind of gets everywhere.
regular ass soap
I usually use antibacterial hand soap but I’m gonna have to look into ass soap. /s
But not the fancy ass soap, just the regular!
I inherently use dumbass soap. </selfdeprecatinghumour>
No. There’s a hysteria about lead recently, it’s nuts. Surgeons leave bullets in people all the time.
Is it possible the political divide in this country is people with lead poisoning vs. those without it?
The Boomers grew up with EVERYTHING having lead in it, including the air thanks to leaded gasoline. Prolonged lead poisoning is almost surely a factor there.
Can’t blame boomers for the number of Gen-Z males who are absolute chuds.
The voting break in males over 65 is more liberal than those under 25.
Eh, Gen-z who are chuds do of course hold responsibility for their own actions, but they were started down the path by really hard to overcome disadvantages previous generations had where family was present to socialize them, teach them how to treat others, previous generations had third spaces to socialize with peers to learn how not to be asshats, to learn what behaviors wouldn’t be tolerated, and the silent generation, boomers, and now gen-x (my gen) ARE guilty of one by one letting or actively helping all the structures that made socialization and generationally passed down behavioral guidance possible go away or be stripped by stopping the flow of corporate gains to the lower and middle classes, forcing families to all work, and sometimes all work multiple jobs, they voted against social programs, against traditional funding that built transportation systems, parks, and other third spaces by reducing taxation on the wealthy in the name of lowering taxes and the Ayn Rand myth of extreme self reliance.
When you stop investing in society, you stop getting the benefits of a society, and the first to go is the social contract, where people treat each other with some level of respect due to acknowledgement of said social contract, for the most part.
You can blame them for being in positions of power that can be taken advantage of due to the brain damage.
Also radioactive fallout from nuclear testing (over 1000 nuclear devices in the US) during their early development
I have been pointing this out for like 20 years. Even with good sanitation and PPE, lead residue from shooting is surprisingly hard tocompletely eliminate. I was as shooting maybe a couple of times per week, primarily with a bolt action rifle and shotgun, wearing gloves, wiping things down, and I could still find detectable lead residue on my range bag, and in my car (!).
Someone who is putting hundreds of rounds per week of dog shit ammo through their AR is 1000% exposing themselves and their family to a slowly increasing background supply of lead.
Someone on Lemmy wrote, a little over a year ago I think, that lead ossifies in the bones and then gets released into the blood as bones soften with age. This then affects the brain and might explain why older people have seemingly sudden personality changes. I think about this often.
It is one of the processes of lead poisoning yes. Lead is mistaken for Calcium and stored in your bones.
Bruh they put lead in gasoline until the 80s.
MAGA is 10% nazis, 10% cult members, 10% painfully-ignorant cunts, 69% lead addled boomers/genx
and 1% rich fucks manipulating the rest of them.
airplane fuel is still leaded.
You are correct, but since some may read that and assume that all aviation fuel is leaded, I wanted to add more info.
Most people don’t know that “airplane fuel” and “jet fuel” are different. Jet fuel is not leaded. The fuel used by small, piston-driven prop engines is. Because small piston aircraft still use leaded fuel, aviation is still the largest source of airborne lead emissions. The FAA is working to phase it out by 2030.
Iirc locations downwind or under approach/depart flight lanes of small airports deal with an exposure risk fairly above baseline. I feel like I remember reading then that it ties into modern redlining where there are more minority populations in those areas due to cost of housing and the generational impacts of lead exposure.
You know what’s funny? One of the “quirky” things about the Fallout Universe is how everything is radioactive because all their tech is based on fission/fusion right? It’s meant to be funny like haha yeah our pollution is bad but atleast we’re not poisoning ourselves with everything we do. Yet if you sub out “radioactive” for “heavy metal contamination” and “microplastics” etc that’s basically 100% accurate to real life america.
So is most racing fuel.
Just flew with 100LL, and I also clean up with anti-lead soap. I’m the only pilot I know who does this, but I can’t wait to fly something electric ugh.
The politics and logistics issues holding back lead free avgas are extremely frustrating. I really thought we would have seen that transition by now.
Who knows, maybe it will take electric aircraft to finally put an end to the issue.
Maybe you can pull it off WW2 style by adding a couple % of aniline to unleaded gasoline
huh. maybe the chemtrail people were onto something.
I’ve known a few that were certainly on something…
Most people don’t handle airplane fuel
The danger from leaded fuels don’t come from handling, but from the exhaust. The lead becomes breathable and enters the environment, exposing those who lived in urban areas and near roads to more lead than others.
The other poster isn’t wrong about airplane fuel being leaded, but that can be misleading because most people don’t know that “airplane fuel” and “jet fuel” are different. Jet fuel is not leaded, but the fuel used by small, piston-driven prop engines is.
Yeah but the jet stream takes care of any concerning concentrations of exhaust.
Even under 10,000 ft the atmospheric dispersion is orders of magnitude above surface.
The turbulence at the surface on a bad day can ‘lock out’ the upper atmosphere sometimes, which is extra dangerous for surface car exhaust - but is actually beneficial the higher your altitude vs ground.
So in all ways the ways airplane fuel would expose someone to lead, isnt experienced by the general populace. (minus directly handling the fuel, may have concentrated lead get on someone’s hand/food, but thats another situation)
Most people don’t handle airplane fuel
I can’t handle it. I get drunk immediately.
Does the lead in the exhaust come down into the air we breathe? Lead is heavy. Would probably be more in cities with airports and under flight paths. Diluted of course, but repeated every day… Perhaps a tin hat or mask would help.
Yes, but jet fuel isn’t leaded. Leaded avgas is by far the minority, unless you live right next a busy small airport.
Atmospheric dispersion is usually actually concerning good not bad, so it should dilute across the globe fairly quickly.
Air pollution usually becomes an issue when something like nuclear waste reaches the atmosphere, cause we ALL get to breathe in that nuclear waste.
But honestly some (probably large) percentage of meteors are lead deposited right to the atmosphere, cause its so atomically stable nearly everything decays to it.
So no matter what there’s some lead in the soup, and I can’t see jet fuel being a large contributer (to an already small amount)
lol no. Lead in the atmosphere is a problem, because if it’s in the atmosphere, you are breathing it. Remember that next time you see a gas plant spewing out exhaust.
Nuclear power plants will not exhaust anything except water vapor unless things go terribly wrong. Things going terribly wrong basically cannot release radiation with modern designs unless you were to bomb the core directly, with large bombs to defeat the containment building and massive amounts of stuff surrounding them…
Fossil fuels are infinitely worse for everyone than nuclear, with or without lead.
Well jet exhaust would be a very large contributor if it were leaded, but luckily it isn’t. It’s just piston powered prop planes that use leaded “avgas”, anything with a turbine uses an unleaded jet fuel.
As it is, it’s pretty bad, but it could be a lot worse. Airborne lead is really quite bad for many aspects of biology. If small planes stopped burning leaded fuel today, I’m quite sure we would be able to track a measurable difference in health and educational outcomes within a decade.
Thats a good point, not even turboprops are leaded if I remember right.
Obviously it’d require a lot of study to definitively say the impact of the lead, but I’m convinced the impact wouldn’t be able to compare to natural levels in that atmospheric environment. Like we love our planes, but its still energetically really difficult for us to get them up there - but space rocks can have a hard time NOT burning up in our atmosphere. And lead is a larger than uniform part of our universe because its atomic stability, so odds are (IMO) atmospheres relatively lead-y, but have been for centuries.
That and the difficulty creating hotspots in such a turbulent environment makes it required to increase the entire atmosphere’s lead content to increase any one area to dangerous levels.
1996 in the US.
Effective January 1, 1996, the Clean Air Act banned the sale of the small amount of leaded fuel that was still available in some parts of the country for use in on-road vehicles.
Where were these places?
IIRC farm co-ops, rural gas stations, bulk purchases for fleets, etc…
I can remember my grandpa, a career trucker and grease monkey, grumbling about having to use lead substitute in his 60s Ford pickup when I was very young.
Yep, they literally used leaded gasoline to wash off their hands in the 70s. Nevermind the exhausts blanketing everything with it.
I hate that Gen-X is represented here.
I’d like to see this graphed against political leaning and opinions on things like gay rights or abortion.
This just proves that broader economic trends exist, but especially cause how much it detaches at the end, yet increases in step this is obviously not causation, and is really only loose correlation
Perhaps the preschoolers who were exposed to lead, who then went on to become violent 20-somethings, continued to be more violent in their 30s.
The divergence makes sense.
Children age out of the sample cohort, but still have high lead levels and still contribute to the crime cohort.
I’d expect to see the lead level rate be proportional to the birth rate and the crime rate proportional to the death rate. Having the chart extend another 15 years to today might show that.
Thats a good point, I always get messed up on small aspects of statistics like that
That’s incorrect. It’s correlation, not causation.
If lead were such a direct cause of violence, they should start diverging at the introduction of lead, not long after a notable decline in lead levels. (ok ok not diverge at first, but still have a predictable, visible connection throughout)
Children grow up constantly, and only one of the lines is not age-restricted. If it were to ever diverge while still being a major cause, it’d begin to diverge
at the introduction of the stimulus…or rather, start to diverge when the supposed initiating cause was reduced.As you say, lead is a lifetime problem. If it were to be a tent pole contributor to violence, violence wouldn’t have reduced in lockstep basically ever.
Lead is a massive problem and is a toxin, but it surely did not itself contribute to increased violence. Increased stupidity? Absolutely.
I wouldn’t rule it out. They wanted a new Rome, and they’re getting one - complete with Diarrhea Forever™
The “Super gun owners” account for only like 3% of Americans. And a lot of those still don’t shoot enough to meaningfully manifest the symptoms of lead poisoning on its own.
It’s probably just medical advances letting bitter racist old fucks live longer.
Old fucks who grew up with so much lead in the atmosphere from burning gasoline that the lead from a few recreational bullets is just noise.
And the paint, don’t forget the leaded paint. And the ceramic tile. And cosmetics. And costume jewelry. And pipes/plumbing. And pottery. And older vinyl, like blinds. And almost all older strained glass uses lead to hold the panels together. And even older plastics often contained lead to soften the material, and we all know how badly old plastic often deteriorates.
There’s a shit ton of lead in products made before the turn of the century.
9 million people is still a lot of people, much less the kids playing with the ‘bb pellets’ in their closet and other exposures due to those 9 mil.
And all that lead in gasoline they had kicking around everywhere growing up.
Leaded gas was prominent in the US until it was phased out ~1980-90s. I’ve always wonder if this had a large effect on those growing up in earlier times, i.e. those in their 60-70s now, or the baby boomer generation.
It’s from them licking paint.
The US has a lot of gun owners, but it also has a lot of people who don’t own guns but are MAGAs anyway.
They might have grown up in a household with an active gun owner, which, when combined with bad hygiene practices after shooting, might cause lead to cause developmental effects.
Nah, I’m far enough left that I believe in getting guns back.
Were your parents using guns on the regular?That is the important question here, because lead has very long lasting consequences.
(Btw, just having guns does fuck all against militarized police units)
Currently there is a push for hunters to switch to all copper bullets. The bullet technology has gotten good enough that solid copper bullets can be designed in a way to consistently petal and create big wound channels. They’re obviously more expensive so I stick with lead for the range and practice.
At the learn to hunt deer class I went to they reviewed a study that showed that lead bullets fragment and shed when they hit the target. The study shot a hog cadaver (iirc), and noted that when they scanned the result they found lead up to 16" away from the impact point and that it was probably even further but their scanner was limited to scanning just that size. The class then demonstrated shooting an all copper bullet at a series of water jugs in a bullet trap to show how it petals.
All that to say, this is a current topic in the hunting community and people are switching away from lead. More and more manufacturers are making copper core bullets and they’re coming down in price. If you’re interested Barnes is the go to manufacturer for these right now.
Edit: Also bird shot moved away from lead a long time ago. It’s not even legal to use it anymore.
Edit 2: Turns out lead bird shot isn’t illegal to use, it’s only outright banned for water fowl hunting. https://www.fws.gov/story/2022-04/nontoxic-shot-regulations-hunting-waterfowl-and-coots-us. You should also check your local laws, here in Wisconsin it’s also banned for mourning dove hunting.
In 1991, the US Fish and Wildlife Service launched a nationwide ban on lead shot for waterfowl hunting to reduce the number of lead shot falling into waterbodies. Since the inception of dove hunting in Wisconsin in 2003, the DNR has prohibited the use of lead shot for hunting mourning doves on state-managed lands.
In my mind I just equated that with being banned all together. Who wants to study the law just to find out when they can use toxic shot?
FYI, a significant amount of lead exposure from shooting isn’t really from the bullets but from the primers which contain lead compounds.
The lead in the bullet is going downrange, and is often jacketed in something like copper, you’re not gonna come in contact with a whole lot of lead from handling most ammo, and there’s absolutely some amount of fragmentation and fouling and such happening, but lead from the bullet isn’t exactly getting sprayed all around.
But the primer absolutely does vaporize a bunch of lead compounds and you can inhale those fumes and particles settle on your clothes and such. Lead free primers are out there, but they’re not very common, and a lot of people find them to be more unreliable.
Now lead exposure from the actual projectiles isn’t zero, and there’s no real safe level of lead exposure, so don’t get complacent about that either, but in the grand scheme it’s often not the biggest issue
This right here is the truth.
I tried switching to nontoxic primers but holy cow they’re expensive and hard to find in the calibers I need. The industry could care if it wanted to, I just don’t think it does.
“… but lead from the bullet isn’t exactly getting sprayed all around.”
no, just the bullets themselves get sprayed around everywhere. Regardless of what removing lead from bullets would mean for humans, it would be great for the environment either way.
Lead ammunition is harmful to predator and scavenger species.
I’m using lead free ammo since last year and I’m content with the results. Many conservative, mostly older hunters claim that the killing power is inferior. But in my experience, even with a lead-free deformable bullet, the killing power is still perfectly adequate, even for smaller game. Killing power depends largely on the point of impact, so if the animal runs a long way, it’s the hunter’s fault, not the ammunition’s.
I’ve always been confused by the killing power argument.
A sufficiently high velocity impact to the correct location kills regardless of the material in question typically.
So as long as the material does not cause fov to go to absolute shit or something then functionally it shouldn’t matter.
Lead is very dense, so a bullet the same size delivers more force. Steel was an early alternative, and in addition to being less dense, it also tends not to deform into a mushroom shape during impact like lead and copper do. So a steel bullet can penetrate cleanly through a target leaving a narrower path and have a slower penetration and exit velocity, all combining to do less damage.
The density benefit is the same reason some high end rounds use tungsten and even depleted uranium. Heavier bullets of the same size fly straighter and hit harder.
Steel and copper also tend to cause more barrel wear than lead. Probably tungsten does too, but I don’t have experience with it, let alone depleted uranium, lol.
It’s still worth switching away from lead though.
The force difference would be absolutely miniscule. The energy comes from the powder, not the bullet material. Denser cores increase penetration by concentrating the force, not magically delivering more force.
Of course it isn’t an energy multiplier. The energy carried as the bullet leaves the barrel will be very very close to the same. The energy it carries will be lost more quickly to air resistance with a less dense round though. Especially since the same powder behind less mass, means more speed, means more air resistance. How much that matters depends on a lot of factors, but it can certainly be enough to matter.
Unless you’re a sniper working from 100+ yards, you do not need to care about the energy delivery difference air resistance would make.
Even then, it’s more about bullet drop and far less about suddenly losing lethality.
Yes and no. I think the reasoning behind this often has to do with how the projectile behaves after striking the target. Generally speaking, a distinction is made between deformation-type and fragmentation-type projectiles, and, if I understand the arguments correctly, it’s assumed that lead-free projectiles don’t fragment as effectively or, in the case of deformation-type projectiles, don’t mushroom as well as lead-based ones do. I don’t know if there was any truth to that when lead-free ammunition was first developed, but today that’s definitely no longer the case, and that argument is therefore invalid.
That technical level of discussion is all totally BS as far as politics is concerned. If your target can be harmed and isn’t armored, almost any kind of bullet will harm them. If they’re armored properly, nothing civilians get access to is going to harm them.
If you’re defending from an intruder, do you think they’ll be stopped faster by six bullets that fragment into five pieces each, or six bullets that fragment into three pieces each? Or maybe your (royal your: the people who seriously whine about all gun regulation) dumb ass is just splitting hairs after six shots…
The deformation is exactly it. That’s why I’m that class I went to they demoed out. The copper bullet perfectly petaled the way it was supposed to into a star like pattern. That would leave a serious wound channel to bleed out of.
You can 1000% still get lead birdshot and it is 100% legal to use in most states, with the exceptions being for a statewide ban in California, and waterfowl where it is illegal to use nationwide.
Edit: Spelling
Dang, I guess you’re right. What I was thinking of is the ban on hunting water fowl with lead shot
https://www.fws.gov/story/2022-04/nontoxic-shot-regulations-hunting-waterfowl-and-coots-us
I wear gloves when shooting .22LR. No, I am not a MAGA nutter and I fully support gun control.
We would shoot steel core but the government considers it “Armor Piercing” so its banned from import and from a lot of states… So its lead.
Steel bullets would also absolutely destroy 99.9% of rifled barrels. Which is the vast majority of them.
They are copper jacketed, well the ones I have are. Also got a pile of Russian steel core before Obama banned their importation.
Yes, notice how it is shaped far more complicated than a normal lead bullet? Now why in the world would they make it so complicated if there didn’t have to be a softer metal on the outside…? 🤔
Lead is 1000% cheaper than that style of bullet. The only way changing out all bullets to (functional) steel would work is if you wanted to make it even more of a yuppie hobby in the US…
Not to mention, such styles of ammo suck at dropping soft targets…
To be fair, they probably don’t make a habit of practicing any hygiene behaviors, not just bullet related
Don’t you know that washing your own ass makes you gay? /s
You say this, but I can tell you that there are real people that follow that line of thought. Not a lot in the grand scheme, but they can vote just like anyone else. And that type of reasoning permeates everything they do.
lmao I am aware
I actually pack purpose built lead wipes in my bag when I shoot, and I will refrain from eating or even touching my face until I’m properly able to wash my hands thoroughly. Clothes usually need changing from mud/sweat and there’s always a shower as soon as I get home. When I’m on a long enough day that eating is desired I’ll only pack food that I can eat without directly manipulating with my hands, ie peanuts I can pour out of the bag or some form of MANLY MEAT STICK IT’S TOTALLY NOT A DICK EWW that I can peel/push up out of packaging without touching.
I’ve even started wearing gloves when cleaning guns since that’s actually where you will get the most acute lead exposure, even when it’s summer time and humid in my non climate controlled garage.
Some of us care, just not that many.
Oh so now I can’t lick my fingers clean after a day of plinking?!?
Most practice ammunition has a lead core wrapped in copper. There is very little contact.
Not .22 - the cheaper stuff tends to be exposed lead
I don’t think I’ve ever seen FMJ .22 ammo. The best you can find is “copper washed” or “brass washed” which I guess is electroplated or painted or something with a metal solution that seems like it’s about one molecule thick. It still gets lead marks all over everything.
Shotgun shot is also traditionally just lead, unjacketed, although nobody should be coming into contact with that much except the recipient because it all stays inside the shell. And non-lead shot is mandated for hunting in a lot of places now for obvious environmental reasons, either being steel or tungsten or bismuth or whatever.
Shotgun shot contacts the barrel, so there’s going to be some creation of dust and rubbing on the barrel. The user will be exposed to that in the air and when cleaning.
Not unless you’re oldschooling it hard enough to be using felt or cardboard wads and not a plastic shot cup as found in modern shells. Or unsaboted slugs, I suppose, which definitely contact the barrel. In the former case, you probably already have an impressive handlebar mustache and a large collection of brass shells, a keg of black powder in your basement right next to your keg of whiskey, and you’re touching your shot all the time while you’re handloading anyway.
Shotguns do, however, disseminate their shot all over the countryside when people hunt with them since statistically speaking only a rather small portion of the shot tends to actually hit the target.
I mean when you fire the round, the shot exits the cartridge and proceeds down the barrel, naked.
No it doesn’t. The shot cup and the charge of shot travel down the barrel as a single contiguous unit. The outer walls of the cup are what contact the barrel. The shot doesn’t appreciably separate from the cup until several feet past the end of the muzzle when the petals of the shot cup are no longer restrained by the barrel. Separation is only able to happen when the cup encounters wind resistance out there in open air, and this is trivially verifiable by firing a bird shot shell at a paper target from only a couple of feet away.
This is all especially so with steel shot, because you definitely don’t want that touching the inside of the barrel. I haven’t cut a buckshot shell apart lately so I suppose it’s possible that there are still commercial loads out there that just utilize a plastic wad with no cup, but birdshot shells certainly don’t.
Edit! It was remarkably difficult to find a slow motion video of this in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1if2QKHWmU4
.22s are generally electroplated. Lead tends to stick to rifling, that’s why most people don’t like to shoot lead.
Yeah, I just looked at the Winchester Super X i usually get, ut is plated. Idk why I thought it was jacketed.
There’s often lead in the primers too 💀
You probably get more lead from your plumbing, at least in America.
Why is lead used for bullets?
It’s dense, cheap, and has a low melting point making it easy to cast.
Because it is very dense. A heavier bullet carries more momentum, will travel further for a given speed and be less prone to drift from wind, thus more accurate. Lead is just the cheapest densest stuff available. Bismuth is becoming the popular non-toxic alternative, but it is a fair bit more pricey than lead.
It’s heavy and soft
Don’t forget cheap.
Ok guys, can we leave OP’s mom out of this for even one thread? This is serious.
So is a ton of feathers. Lead is dense.
And heavier is better because it does more damage?
It maintains more momentum.
Throw a ping pong ball and a golf ball, see which goes farther.
Also, it’s easier to throw a golf ball accurately than it is to throw a ping pong ball.
Also golf ball hurts hell of a lot more.
Also, golf balls have cute little dimples.
Kinetic energy = (mass * velocity²)/2. It’s not as important as velocity, but yeah it’s important. The real key is that it is soft. Meaning it will deform more readily when it impacts a target. When it deforms it spreads out, creates a larger wound channel, and more effectively dumps its energy into the object it hit target than just cleanly passing through.
That said, these days there is a big push to move to all copper bullets for hunting. They’re more expensive, they don’t deform quite as well, but they do consistently pedal now, they don’t shed mass, and they’re basically inert to our bodies. I practice with cheaper lead core bullets, but I have the more expensive copper stuff to hunt with.
Lead being a soft material is a part of it too.
A lead bullet deforms on impact, getting wider, which causes more damage as it passes through flesh.
It also deforms in the barrel, allowing the grooves to impart a spin, improving accuracy
That’s a property of the copper jacket, not the lead core.
Nope. The core is the strength of the bullet. If it were steel, you can bet your ass that thin copper jacket is not going to magically allow the bullet to squish through the barrel.
Well, both really. As long as the metal is sufficiently softer than the steel of the barrel.
also easy to DIY lead bullets for cost and prepper types.
Is anybody aware of studies quantifying direct (shooter) and indirect (household member) lead exposure? The gold standard (so to speak) is bloodstream lead levels, but I think that’s hard to measure as it relates to specific events like going to the gun range.
Here’s one: https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/l/2014/lead-among-shooters.pdf
Lots of relevant links to other studies in the References section. A couple relevant paragraphs from the link PDF:
A health care practitioner notified a local health unit after seeing an asymptomatic 70 year old male patient with a blood lead level (BLL) of 12 μg/dL (0.61 μmol/L1). The patient reported that he shoots twice weekly at an indoor firing range operated by volunteers. Public Health Ontario (PHO) was asked to “review the patient’s BLL and provide advice on the significance of the results relative to expected background levels”. As a result of this advice, a lead exposure assessment of the firing range was initiated by the health unit.
Results from the exposure assessment found that four of the five breathing zone samples performed on shooters [task-based time-weighted average (TWA) lead concentrations ranged from 3–147 μg/m3 over the sampling periods (19–47 minutes)] exceeded Ontario’s occupational exposure limit of 50 μg/m3 (8 hr TWA). This indicated the inadequacy of the existing ventilation system to reduce inhalable airborne lead generated during shooting. Wipe and vacuum samples showed the presence of lead on eight of the nine surfaces tested. Lead dust on surfaces inside a firing range can be easily transferred to hands, which can result in ingestion of lead through hand-to-mouth contact.
A good gun range should have ventilation systems that filter air from the range itself and prevent any lead particles from migrating into the non-range areas (lounge / weapons-maintenance areas, any attached ammo shop, bathrooms, etc.). The highest-risk area is where the targets sit. The amount of lead particulate at the shooting bays will vary depending on the type of ammo (copper jacketed bullets would likely generate less lead particulate, plain lead wadcutter would likely generate more), but any ammo type is going to get smashed into bits when it hits the backstop behind the target. The ventilation system needs to pull air at the targets, and pull it away from people. I’m sure many ranges have less-than-adequate ventilation systems. Shooters should still wash their face and everything south of their elbows really well after using the range, even if the range has great ventilation, because the amount of lead exposure in recreational shooting will always be non-zero.
There is non-lead ammunition, particularly bismuth. Similar density to lead but non-toxic. (Edit: also tungsten ammo, but I believe tungsten has similar toxicity issues to lead). Lead ammunition has been outright banned for waterfowl hunting in some areas, because lead pellets would inevitably wide up in the environment and leach into the wetlands. Lead is still the overall most common ammo type, because it’s the cheapest material for the purpose.
Bismuth also has the added advantage of being able to cure your upset stomach,. diarrhea, indigestion/acid reflux!
You just have to dissolve the round in hot nitric acid, then separate the white (tin) crystals that form (after an hour of keeping it hot) by pouring the resulting liquid through an acid-resistant paper filter (or a fancy glass microfiber), and finally react the purified bismuth solution with salicylic acid and BAM! DIY Pepto Bismol 👍
You chemistry majors are such a pain in the ass 🤣
I guess it’s very dependent on how many times the shooter shoots the household member.
That’s a much more acute form of lead poisoning.
