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Oh so now I can’t lick my fingers clean after a day of plinking?!?
I’m not stopping you. I might get a little sick watching you but, you do you my guy 😂
Dude, I think I’ve had my fill of
Pbpeanut butter but you help yourself.
Every time I try to tell them, but they wouldn’t lead me explain
I’m not surprised. People don’t even wash their hands after using the rest room.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Oh sorry, I just deal in the fanciest of ass soaps. You want Clean That Butt on 3rd
I inherently use dumbass soap. </selfdeprecatinghumour>
Well you should be washing your hands, and using lead removal soap for 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.
No. There’s a hysteria about lead recently, it’s nuts. Surgeons leave bullets in people all the time.
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.
They’re blasted out the barrel, that shit is not going back at your face in any meaningful amount. That would be the worse design ever if hot gases came back into the face of the operator. The only real danger about aerosolized lead is if you’re running a suppressor and in an indoor range with shit ventilation, and those are usually shut down pretty quickly. The fire Marshal will shut that shit down in a heartbeat if the ventilation is shit (unspent gunpowder is stupid flammable).
If you think 100% of the gasses from a primer strike shoot out of the end of your barrel and don’t go anywhere else then I’m not sure what to tell you because that’s just not the case. Or you’re shooting some very bizarre guns.
Sure not 100% but it’s going to be 99.99% of it. There is very little material in a primer in the first, and of that material only 40% of it is lead based. You’re going to get more lead exposure from handling fishing weights made from lead than gas exposure of vapor from a primer.
I don’t have hard data on how many microns or percents of primer heavy metals are ending up in my gas tube or on my clothes or hands. But from what I know it’s a nonzero amount and I take precautions accordingly like I would for any nonzero amount of heavy metals. Lead is cumulative, so every tiny bit adds up over the years.
If you don’t think that’s an issue for you, then rock on my friend. Keep doing it the way you want.
I get more lead exposure from being outside in a city during a dusty day. On top of that, you can literally reduce your bodies ability to absorb lead by eating healthy foods with calcium or rich in iron.
https://www.canr.msu.edu/resources/fight_lead_with_nutrition
So that’s how they got dumber.
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.
Is it possible the political divide in this country is people with lead poisoning vs. those without it?
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.
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.
It is one of the processes of lead poisoning yes. Lead is mistaken for Calcium and stored in your bones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
You can blame them for being in positions of power that can be taken advantage of due to the brain damage.
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
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 wouldn’t rule it out. They wanted a new Rome, and they’re getting one - complete with Diarrhea Forever™
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.
It’s from them licking paint.
Derek Muller has a lot of interesting, sad, and scary things to say about that: https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA
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.
Lead exposure won’t make good people bad, but it will make bad people worse.
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.
I hate that Gen-X is represented here.
airplane fuel is still leaded.
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.
Maybe you can pull it off WW2 style by adding a couple % of aniline to unleaded gasoline
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.
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
huh. maybe the chemtrail people were onto something.
I’ve known a few that were certainly on something…
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.
Most people don’t handle airplane fuel
Most people don’t handle airplane fuel
I can’t handle it. I get drunk immediately.
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)
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.
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.
Yes, but jet fuel isn’t leaded. Leaded avgas is by far the minority, unless you live right next a busy small airport.
It’s why boomers are so fucking dumb
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.
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
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’d like to see this graphed against political leaning and opinions on things like gay rights or abortion.
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.
True but maybe stop killing shit
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.
Yeah I shoot a lot but I don’t hunt.
Yeah that’s my thing. And not even often anymore. Just enough to keep the skills up.
Hunting is literally the most ethical way to consume meat.
Not only that but us fucking over the local ecology we have to step in and kill off some numbers of prey species or they will literally starve to death. It’s fucked up, but we’re in this mess and until we collectively are fine with wolves et al, we’ll need to continue it.
Fun fact, the wolf reintroduction efforts in many places across the US have been going very well! I’m only posting this because you mentioned wolves and I think it’s like one of the very few positive environmental stories I know of. We still need to hunt (mostly deer) to keep population from exceeding the habitat carrying capacity in many places. But it’s super neat that there’s people out there working to restore some of the collective harm on the environment that we’ve caused.
… 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.
There’s no such thing as lab grown meat and if there ever will be it’s not in the near term
Prior post to this one but the ecology in some areas of the USA and North America in general are so fucked that unless we literally thin the herd they will die of starvation.
It’s ethical for a farmer to protect themselves and live stock but many are gun ho about killing all predators. Given that a lot of farms tend to be remote, you have a rifle in the truck and pack a pistol to at least try to scare away the animal.
Lab-grown meat will likely have an odd taste to it but is more likely to be morally acceptable.
Lab-grown meat will likely have an odd taste
Considering we can taste the difference between corn-fed and grass-fed beef, I’d imagine they would work on figuring out the nutrient slurry that makes the meatalog taste best. They might even be able to improve the taste, texture, marbling, &c. I just don’t expect the first generation product to be great
It would still be a massive, amazing development just needs some time to properly age.
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!
I recommend de-lead wipes for a range bag mainstay. Works as a moist towlette even when you aren’t shooting.
Are they unscented?
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.
The Hoppes brand ones are either unscented or so mild that I don’t smell anything.
IIRC It’s more that shooting the lead bullets vaporizes little bits of metal dust, and certain gun designs project a lot of this towards the user’s face. AKA. Hot lead dust in the face.
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.
Why is lead used for bullets?
The study points out that it is twice as cheap as alternatives.
It’s heavy and soft
And heavier is better because it does more damage?
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.
also easy to DIY lead bullets for cost and prepper types.
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.
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.
So is a ton of feathers. Lead is dense.
Don’t forget cheap.
Ok guys, can we leave OP’s mom out of this for even one thread? This is serious.
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 dense, cheap, and has a low melting point making it easy to cast.
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.
Whenever I shoot I always make sure to either do it while wearing gloves and/or wash my hands with a specific soap that more readily removes heavy metal dust and residue.
“Wait… It’s still lead poisoning?”
“Always has been…”
They aren’t washing in general.
I want to disagree with you, but like one time I was working in a kitchen. I had a little sniffle so I wore a mask and was washing my hands up to the elbows every half hour. The other folk on the crew thought I was weird for wearing a mask and actually insane for washing my hands. Not for washing my hands so often, just for washing my hands.
Some people are gross
Lead isn’t THAT bad, especially since pretty much every bullet I can think of has either a plastic shell, or copper jacket
Gun shot residue contains lead particulate, which spreads onto your hands, arms, and face when shooting and can be ingested, for example, by handling food without cleaning your hands. Or cleaning a gun somewhere where you prepare or eat food.
I disagree for two reasons. First, there’s lots of ammo that’s non jacketed lead. Start with .22LR, which is probably the most common ammo.
Second, I didn’t think the jacketing helps that much in either hunting or indoor range contexts. In hunting, the bullet mushrooms or fragments or disintegrates, dispersing it’s kinetic energy through lots of tissue; that’s how it kills. Disintegration means there are lots of tiny lead bits scattered in the meat. And at the range, if the bullet hits a hard backstop, it again disintegrates into even finer pieces, making lead dust.
Birds would disagree.
Especially black ones.
When you shoot bits of the lead projectile get aerosolized as it rips through the barrel and caught in the expanding gas cloud of the propellant. This gets deposited on you and your clothes, especially at an indoor range. Since you can’t remove lead from your system this can build up over time.
thats why CSI/ and law and order made a big deal about gun residue, its what they use in forensics likely too for gun crimes.
Some evidence suggests that coriander can help remove lead in lab rats.
Cheap .22 target loads, shotgun target loads, and even some birdshot are full of the stuff.
But, even if you don’t shoot those often, lead is still in all smokeless powder and primers. Every time you fire a round of any kind, there’s airborne lead being aerosolized. That’s why indoor ranges are required to be ventilated and why many don’t allow pregnant women in the shooting area.
Lead is “that bad”. The health effects are serious and undeniable. But don’t take my word for it, please educate yourself and do better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning
Even if you don’t care about your own health, lead exposure isn’t taken seriously enough in our hobby, and your attitude makes all us look ignorant.
Lead is pretty bad. There’s literally no safe exposure level for it especially if you’re putting explosions next to the stuff. A lot of the sharp drop in crime in the 1990s is attributed to the phase out of leaded gasoline in the 1970s
Lead seems pretty bad to me. It’s inherently neurotoxic and gets in the brain easily enough. If you are breathing in aerosolized lead regularly it has a real potential to do harm, even if it doesn’t necessarily kill you there will be negative consequences.
