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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

Lead contamination is a bit of a crusade of mine. I'm always frustrated when the topic comes up. People will object to any proposed improvement by saying "I've been doing <XYZ> for 40 years and it hasn't killed me yet!"

Yeah, it hasn't killed you, but how do you know you're not 10 IQ points dumber than you could have been?

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Are there alternatives to lead for bullets and shotgun shells? If so, it would great to mandate them and keep all that lead out of the environment. We got rid of lead in most fuels; ammunition could be next.

Yes, there are alternatives, primarily steel, but it's quite a bit more expensive. For my purposes, I only ever hunt with steel pellet shells, I would never use lead.

Hunting is so expensive anyways. What's a few more bucks? Pun not intended

Most families that hunt for meat, including mine, are not wealthy. We are not talking about sport hunters, we are talking about subsistence hunting. It's still very common in large swathes of America. Just looking around for the lowest prices possible, the cost of steel shot is more than double the cost of lead shot for #3 shells (commonly used for waterfowl). For #00 shells (used for deer and medium game) it's more than three times as expensive. Ammo costs add up quick, as you need to practice with the same shells you hunt with.

Working in tech, I can afford to buy higher quality and more expensive things, and the ammunition I use is no exception. But for many people it's not really within their budget. Lead is cheap, it's one of the main reason its used to make projectiles in the first place.

Yeah but none of those things are reasons to permit releasing all that lead into the environment. Every bird that you take with lead shot poisons another generation of fish and their predators, which isn't really fair to fish and fishermen. California banned leaded ammunition and as far as I have heard that did not increase the rate of childhood malnutrition or whatever.

I'm not advocating that people should use leaded ammunition, so I'm not sure what argument you think you are trying to make? I'm advocating having a bit of empathy for people who don't make tech salaries and buy all their groceries at whole foods. The posted article looks like primarily an anti-gun hit piece, and your reply also reads as an uncharitable take that is placing a lot of blame and responsibility on individuals who, for the most part, are just trying to feed their families.

I don't see the hit piece aspects of the article at all. Perhaps you did not read it. It seems quite factual and even-handed.

Anyway I have a feeling that you are radically over-estimating the size of the subsistence hunter population. It is a vanishingly small slice of what is already a tiny fraction of the American population. Last I heard only 3% of Americans ever hunted, and it was yet another one of those things that has a real strong positive correlation with household income.

If you really want to empathize with subsistence hunters then your beef is with wacko preppers. I didn't even notice the price difference when I switched to copper rifle loads but after COVID-19 started the price of a box of rifle cartridges tripled.

Geez, wait until they see the bill for cleaning up all the lead in the environment from their shooting.

LoL, if they are subsistence hunting they arent using a machine gun. There wont be lead all over as they shouldnt be taking more than one shot in the first place.

Why does hunting and practice ammo need to be the same? Is subsistence hunting that precise?

And if you can use cheap ammo for practice, then I would guess the price of ammo for actual hunting wouldn't be very significant. A dollar extra per animal or something?

I don't really know, just trying to understand.

different ballistic trajectories. You need to zero your rifle with one ammo type. This may be different for shotguns

Isn't that for long-range? I guess so, I just didn't know that was a major factor for typical hunters on a budget (who probably have cheap scopes anyway).

A few dollars is make or break for the week for a lot of rural folks. When I was getting my hunting license, speaking to other people there made me realize how much of a (privileged) bubble I lived in.

> the cost of steel shot is more than double the cost of lead shot for #3 shells (commonly used for waterfowl). For #00 shells (used for deer and medium game) it's more than three times as expensive.

That's surprising. In bulk, steel is a fraction of the cost of lead (usually, though at the moment the market seems a bit crazy). Is steel shot seen as a luxury product for hippies with money, or where does the difference come from?

Supply and demand. Demand is low, for all the reasons mentioned. Lead shot benefits from economy of scale.

You only use one round to harvest an animal, but that round can be preceded by tens or hundreds of rounds at the range, much of which should be with the same load and bullet.

It's not just cost - steel and copper bullets expand less, so animals harvested with them can be wounded for longer periods before dying, which many hunters see as unethical.

It is also worth noting that gun ranges periodically reclaim the lead by digging up their backdrops and recycling all of the spent bullets. The lead will not stay there forever.

There are some practical problems:

1) Steel core ammunition is illegal for use in handguns since its armor piercing. Banning lead without relaxing rules on steel would create legal problems. And in some states steel core is illegal in all types of firearms.

2) Steel is more likely to spark if it hits a rock, for this reason it's banned in ranges out west and National Forest/BLM areas due to the risk of forest fire

3) Ammunition is out of stock everywhere and it would would definitely cause shortages and price people out of the market. There are millions of people who need ammunition not only for hunting but pest control, wilderness self-defense, and so on.

4) Someone more knowledgeable than me may argue this but it may not be as humane in some cases, since lead is designed to tumble and fracture killing the animal instantly while steel is more likely to go right through a target.

> 1) Steel core ammunition is illegal for use in handguns since its armor piercing. Banning lead without relaxing rules on steel would create legal problems. And in some states steel core is illegal in all types of firearms.

It wouldn't surprise me if this were the secret goal for some people.

> Hunting is so expensive anyways. What's a few more bucks? Pun not intended

This is not a true statement. I started hunting with a $115 shotgun and a $35 license which in turn provided my 1 deer, dozens of rabbits and countless ducks. If I were to take just the deer into consideration compared to lets say the price of pork at $2.99 / Lb. ( not to mention the cost of beef ) One hundred pounds of pork would cost me $299. The deer cost me $150 and I get to keep the gun. No I didn't need a truck, I walked out the door and into the woods. Yes I had to buy ammo but it lasted several seasons and I got to use the gun for the rest of my life.

My junior and senior year in school hunting provided all the protein for my family.

Of course, just likely anything else, you can make hunting as expensive as you would like it to be.

Be careful of prions, wild game is not the safest source of protein.

While in theory you might be correct, do we have any evidence that a human has ever contracted a prion disease from eating a wild animal? I eat wild game, and I'm concerned about CWD, but I don't think there is much cause for alarm yet.

Steel. At least in my state, lead shot is illegal to hunt with, but you can use it for clay pidgins.

Lot of places have banned lead shot for water fowl hunting. California banned lead bullets for hunting. The replacements are steel shot and bismuth for bullets.

there are more options for shotgun shells than for bullets.

For bullets you can basically do pure copper. I think anything else falls into a 'armor piercing' category that is banned. I'm not 100% clear on the laws there but I know that is why most bullets are still lead core (in addition to cost factors).

lead ammo bans are a way to ban guns without banning guns themselves, similar to 'microstamping' and other odd proposals. Basically mandate something that makes it so costly that no one can do it

There’s a federal ban on using lead ammunition to hunt migratory waterfowl (ducks and geese: https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/hunting/nontoxic.... ). I don’t believe there was ever any followup ban on lead for quail, pheasant, turkey, etc., though.

Ugh, as a kid I grew up fishing shot out of cooked rabbit and pheasant and stacking it up on the side of my plate; or accidentally spitting it out because if you weren't careful you'd crack a tooth. My grandfather goes instantly from 0 to 60 with rage if anyone tries to tell him anything about his hunting (we had hide his ammo when he started getting befuddled). He'll never change. Hopefully younger hunters are aware of just because we did XYZ and it was bad for you means you don't have to do it anymore.

> My grandfather goes instantly from 0 to 60 with rage

Classic symptom of lead poisoning, ironically.

Had a guy blow up when I indicated I would prefer Teflon tape for sealing pipe threads over his favorite Master's metallic pipe dope. Here's the MSDS:

https://www.era-env.com/ERAWcfService/getmsdscontent.svc/?ke...

It's basically powdered lead in an alcohol carrier that you wipe on your threads with a brush.

At first I thought he was just a grumpy old plumber tired of liberal environmentalist kids with their newfangled safety regulations, but perhaps the lifetime of working with leaded solders and leaded thread sealant has affected him in some way...

It doesn't help that there is limited study about casual contact with lead. Most sportsman understand the risks of commercial levels of lead exposure but the occasional contact with the human body or environment is not easily quantifiable or understood.

The classically false "that which doesn't kill me makes me stronger."

It astonishes me that it’s 2021 and they're still selling toys with lead paint and garden hose fixtures with lead in them.

Where? That’s not really a problem in the US as far as I’m aware

Surely you don't think each and every product from all those IKEA-named Chinese resellers on Amazon has been closely vetted for lead and other banned components?

https://www.insider.com/amazon-selling-toxic-toys-lead-poiso...

> A breaking investigation from the Wall Street Journal revealed that online retail giant Amazon has been selling thousands of products that have failed federal safety tests, including children's toys containing four to 411 times the safe limit of lead.

Is there an at home test to determine if anything you have contains lead?

Yes, there are a lot. Don’t buy the overpriced “home” versions.

3M LeadCheck Swabs, Instant Lead Test, 8-Pack https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008BK15PU/

> Where? That’s not really a problem in the US as far as I’m aware

In the US. A lot of goods that originate from overseas made with metal contain lead in their alloys, and lead paint is often used for white paints in particular. A LOT of goods enter the US market from overseas imports containing lead, and there's no real establish process for testing and validating safety or functionality of these products prior to sale.

Garden hoses are lead contaminated, at least the ones I avoided all said 'this product contains lead'. I'm in the US.

Quick link -

https://turfmechanic.com/garden-hoses-lead/

RV specific hoses are much more expensive and they don't contain lead. It's madness.

I wish. Serious lead reduction efforts only started ca. 50 years ago, regulations were phased in irregularly across a huge variety of industries, applications, and jurisdictions over a long period of time (causing many lead-containing products to simply shift from one supply chain to another), and much of it is effectively on the honor system.

https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/sources/consumer-pr...

https://uspirg.org/news/usp/recall-toys-still-found-lead-pai...

It's not really a problem for things made in the US. It's a huge problem for things made in China and then imported into the US.

This is the insidious thing about lead, those consumers who have been exposed now may be unequipped to rationally evaluate the problem, the risk, the severity and alternatives because of their diminished mental state.

Victims of lead based mental illness have the same vote weight that you do.

Your post is a textbook example of a Kafka trap.

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