Quote of the Day
Pacelle posits that lead was banned from products, including paint and gasoline, because of its toxicity.
He adds, “It’s time to restrict hunters from dispersing this toxic metal across millions of acres of New York’s landscapes, poisoning wildlife and putting themselves and their families at risk from ingesting of lead-infused wild-game meat.”
But this is all a lie. What he’s not saying is that he’s talking about entirely different kinds and uses of lead. Traditional ammunition uses non-soluble lead. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not consider expended ammunition, even at shooting ranges, to be a problem of “dispersing toxic metal.”
Nephi Cole
March 24, 2026
Latest Anti-Lead Ammo Attack Isn’t About Ammo at All • NSSF
That is good to know. I sometimes worry about all the lead we put into the ground at Boomershoot. It is right next to cropland. We sometimes put lime in boxes behind the targets to reduce the soil acidity. This will prevent the lead from leaching into the ground and the water. But still, without expensive testing how do we know if we have done enough or we are overdoing it?
You can still find intact civil war bullets on battlefields. The diffusion rate of lead in soil is very low.
Soil conditions surely must matter.
Sure, but lead is hard to dissolve even in strong acids, and most lead salts are insoluble. It probably will dissolve readily in nitric acid, but not in sulphuric or hydrochloric acid let alone in the weak acids found in acidic soil.
Elemental lead is known for its lack of reactivity.
There are farms on top of WW1 battlefields in Europe.
I think that France, at least, did a study to see if all that metal in the dirt was making it into the food and it wasn’t.
Mixing up elements with compounds is a common failing of the scientifically illiterate, and at times done intentionally.
I remember the sheer panic, with full scale lockdowns and hazmat teams deployed, when someone showed up in a school with a thermometer that happened to use mercury — as almost all thermometers did for decades if not centuries. The reality is that metallic mercury is basically harmless. You can probably drink it without ill effect. The vapor is somewhat harmful, as my father found out when he was a chemistry student working in a lab with wooden floors, where many decades of spills had left enough mercury under the floor to create troublesome levels of vapor. The really bad problems come from certain compounds, and even there it matters a whole lot which specific compound you’re looking at.
Same with lead. And there too, a lot of compounds are pretty innocuous because they are insoluble; many lead salts are. The organic compounds of both lead and mercury are known to be problematic, which is a reason to beware of leaded gasoline.
My father liked to quote the case of a science-illiterate activist, who opposed fluoride in drinking water and/or toothpaste on the grounds that fluorine is a highly caustic gas. Sure it is, but fluoride in water or toothpaste is not the element and the properties of the one are entirely unrelated to those of the other.
Last but not least, in the case of lead we can count on at least some of the argument being leftist politics, a field with no connection whatsoever to science (or, arguably, one of negative correlation).
I managed to shut up a friend of my wife’s by offering to eat a tablespoon of table salt if they would eat a teaspoon each of chlorine and sodium.
That seemed to make her FINALLY register the difference between a compound and elements.
Anything to shut us down, make it more expensive.
No lie they won’t tell.