You know, I don’t think guns are very safe.
I grew up fishing using lead split shot sinkers. The common practice is biting down on them to crimp them onto the line. Lead is still the standard. I don’t want to think about how much of that is in my system.
I always put a condom on my gun for extra protection
“Wait… It’s still lead poisoning?”
“Always has been…”
doesn’t lead toxicity cause aggressive behavior? Seems like a pretty bad mix. Almost like you could hypothesize a correlation between our current political climate and lead exposure.
Wouldn’t it be crazy if we could solve a big chunk of our political issues by just banning lead in stuff?
Pistol ranges largely indoors with running water.
Rifle ranges largely rural outdoors. No running water.
I’m not surprised. People don’t even wash their hands after using the rest room.
Cop brain is a real thing.
Since a few people in the thread seem to think lead ammunition is illegal in the US, it’s not. It’s only illegal for shooting waterfowl nationwide, and entirely banned in the state of California.
Is it possible the political divide in this country is people with lead poisoning vs. those without it?
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.
So it’s the Cessnas spraying us with chemicals then? I thought it was the ones with the clearly harmless contrails but dang.
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.
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.
huh. maybe the chemtrail people were onto something.
I’ve known a few that were certainly on something…
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
Isn’t it just for some prop planes? Also there’s an approved unleaded version but for slme reason it’s being rolled out slowly
Jets run on kerosene but higher quality, so yes, the leaded fuel is small prop planes
So is most racing fuel.
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)
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.
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.
It’s why boomers are so fucking dumb
Yep, they literally used leaded gasoline to wash off their hands in the 70s. Nevermind the exhausts blanketing everything with it.
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.
We had one gas station in my town in Oklahoma that sold it right up to the deadline. I used it because both my vehicles were built for it.
Cars made before the 70s need the extra lubrication in the valves or the engines wear out much quicker. Engines made for unleaded fuel usually have valve sleeves to prevent excessive wear.
I hate that Gen-X is represented here.
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 just described each generations qualms with what the generations before them left them.
This might be true if the investment in society, infrastructure and lower classes always had been the same or same direction. After wwii it changed drastically and in favor of the working class and those in need, and society benefited greatly from it, there’s datapoints to show this to be true. Then there was a backlash from the wealthy to all the civil rights movements, labor movements and those investments were pulled back strategically. This is new, because it isn’t a continual trend over time, but that pull back has continued from the 1970s to today’s date.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, in either comment.
Just know that every generation has had the capacity to point at the things that were done because the data exists and the lived experience exists.
Just wait till we discover the novel and fun ways our generations fuck over the earth.
Well at least these generations will have the excuse of real scarcity and hoarding by the ultra wealthy that are armed with ai murderbots. That’s fun.
Can’t blame boomers for the number of Gen-Z males who are absolute chuds.
But we can blame lead poisoning from poorly-soldered vape batteries
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’m not sure that’s as wide of an issue compared to lead being in the gas tank. Then again I don’t know if there were ever studies on fallout from such tests on USA soil.
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
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.
No idea on lead level, but violent crime has mostly stayed fairly level now, property crime is way down. Something to consider is that rapes are up quite a bit, starting around the time #MeToo went viral. Which IMO makes sense, as more women found the courage to speak out.
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.
Lead is a neurotoxin. Its link to violence is not in question by any serious statistical analysis.
Leave apologia at the door please.
Removed by mod
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.
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.
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.
There’s some studies that look into this and its effects on mental health of all stripes. I’m certain in the coming decades there’ll be more as the boomers start suffering and dying.
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.
Derek Muller has a lot of interesting, sad, and scary things to say about that: https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA
Well there’s on going studies that lead poisoning/exposure leads to mental degredation in various ways, including parkinson’s/alheimer’s and similar neurological diseases.
Lead exposure won’t make good people bad, but it will make bad people worse.
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)
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.
So that’s why red state MAGAs seem like they’re brain damaged.
Shooting firearms is messy and dirty. You get all kinds of oils, fouling, lead, particulates on your upper body and hands. If there’s no room at the range, I go home, clean my guns up depending on how much shooting was done, then wipe up and shower. My hands are visibly soiled after shooting a few dozen rounds.
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
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?
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.
Kinetic energy from a projectile is equal to the mass of the projectile times the square of the velocity, but air resistance saps velocity off quite rapidly and independently of the mass. So a heavy projectile will deliver more kinetic energy to a target than a lighter one with the same initial velocity.
A lighter projectile can be driven faster by the same charge of propellant, but air resistance increases with the cube of the velocity so delivering more energy through increased velocity is a losing game. You can decrease air resistance by decreasing the cross section of the projectile, but that requires dense materials like lead.
tldr: the difference is absolutely not minuscule. There’s a reason why bullets are made of dense materials.
The force difference for rounds made to similar WOULD be miniscule, because they’d be made to be similar. OFC you cannot cheat physics. I’m not trying to defend bullets made of fucking feathers here…
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.
You’re correct, but also completely wrong at the same time. Yes, you can have a lighter bullet that is faster that carries the same kinetic energy. It might even hold its energy longer if it’s more aerodynamic. Where you are wrong is the ability to transfer that energy. A full metal jacket would pass clean through the target without transferring most of its energy into the target. A lead bullet that deforms is going to dump a lot more energy into the target. That’s why you have hollow points and other bullets that are designed to petal and fragment on impact. For hunting the goal is a bullet that does pass all the way through creating two wounds to bleed out and cutting as large of a wound channel as possible. Which is different than say self defense where you want a bullet that dumps all of its energy as fast as possible so you don’t over penetrate and hit your neighbor.
I guess all of that falls in line with the force being concentrated. It just really isn’t related to density as much as you’re implying. Unless I misunderstood what you’re saying.
This isn’t a discussion of lead vs some stupid-ass strawman you all imagine. This is about lead vs literally anything possible.
If you think copper or other heavy-ish metal bullets could never compete with lead, even on spread and delivered damage, then you are just stupid.
What strawman did I present? Go ahead, find one.
That’s literally the opposite of what I have said in this thread. I’ve repeatedly said copper is just as effective with the only downside being that it is more expensive. Why don’t you calm down and actually read what was said instead of reacting defensively.
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.
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.
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…
Lead ammunition is harmful to predator and scavenger species.
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
I did not know that about the primers. I’ll be more considerate about washing up after range time. I always made sure to wash my hands after the range and after cleaning the firearms. I never really thought about the particulates on the clothing. Thanks for the info.
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.
Lead from the bullet does actually come out of the barrel in a particularly impressive plume of particulate matter that you then breathe in. It’s caused by friction with the barrel and cuts from the rifling, but it’s very effectively reduced by using jacketed bullets. Just FYI.
Yeah, I probably could have made that a little more clear on that, I did mention jacketed bullets help mitigate your lead exposure, and that it’s not necessary 0 exposure from the projectile, but probably could have given a little more details on that
In my defense though, I don’t think I’ve actually even seen unjacketed ammo in person since I was in boy scouts shooting the cheapest bulk .22 ammo known to man at the summer camp shooting range. I’d almost have to go out of my way to find unjacketed ammo around me these days, even most cheap bulk .22 I see is jacketed now.
It’s definitely out there for some rounds though, and of course reloaders.
Closest I’ve seen in some time is softpoint .45-70 my friend has for his lever gun, and now that I’m thinking about that I’m curious how that stacks up against FMJ as far as lead exposure, since presumably that exposed lead soft point probably shouldn’t really be engaging with the rifling or sides of the barrel.
Good discussion! Most ammo is jacketed these days, but if you ever shoot any non-jacketed ammo you’ll get lead coming out of the barrel for a long time afterwards. Even after pretty thorough cleaning.
The stuff on .22 bullets is plating, not jacketing, and doesn’t really cut down on the lead plume at all. It’s nowhere near as thick as the depth of the rifling. Shooting .22 is like huffing lead plume, with a side of dirty primer and powder smoke. It’s so good for plinking though.
“… 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.
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
Man I love when someone admits they were wrong and doesn’t double down. I like you.
I had no idea. This is neat info.
Explains a lot
Hygiene? Sounds like woke sissy nonsense.
Don’t worry. They’ll take the woke sissy hygiene to the gun range and shoot it.
