Back in the sixties bottom feeding ducks were ingesting lead shot and dying. Any avid water fowl hunter saw it first hand. Not much outcry over the lead shot ban.
A year or two ago a game and fish dude from one of the mich. minn. wis. area states called for a ban because lead was killing bald eagles. A lot of Karen support but I don't know if any regs. got done.
Not much outcry? There was tremendous outcry. It took 30 years for that study to result in nationwide action. And with good reason, the original study was highly suspect. If I recall correctly, it studied LIVE birds. And I don't recall ever seeing studies that actually found lead shot in the bellies of dead birds. I believe in the scientific method, but if you haven't been paying attention, the outcome of "scientific studies" has depended on who is paying for the study for at least half a century now (and probably well before that). This isn't a new phenomenon that just sprang up during the pandemic. There isn't real "peer review" now, because it requires the willingness to commit professional suicide to criticize the prevailing orthodoxy.
And you realize that the alternatives are also toxic - just to different organisms? If they succeed in banning lead to save the birds, the next studies will be about how toxic copper is to other organisms. And therefore it will be banned...
And, of course you know that the "other safe alternatives" are regarded as armor piercing?
At the end of the day, hunters have to get it into their heads that what we do is kill animals. And that for a lot of people, it doesn't matter what or how you do it, many of the non-hunting crowd are against it because of that fact. The majority of Americans have lost touch with that part of life. And that applies doubly to your typical suburban or urban Democrat voter. The people who live in their gated communities or high rise condos with private security don't give a [bleep] about "the common person." They see hunters as bloodthirsty rednecks (who are probably also religious zealots) and from such a low class that they would not want to sit next to you on the subway. You are a deplorable to them. They are embarrassed by your very existence. In their world, the only people who are "allowed" to kill animals are members of native tribes, because they have all been brainwashed with noble savage stereotypes.
I would gladly adopt all copper bullets if I didn't see the switch to copper bullets as a way to make all my existing ammunition illegal to use AND a way to dump billions of dollars of profit into the bullet manufacturers' pockets. Even if copper bullets are just as cheap and effective as lead bullets, the demand for them from the millions of shooters will be insane when the switch is made. If you think previous ammo price hikes were bad, standby... If Sierra, Hornady, and Speer want to run an exchange program for all my unloaded lead bullets, then I will gladly switch to copper. But until I see something like that, I will continue to believe that the bullet manufacturers are not only going along with these new trends, but probably actively encouraging them.
Additionally, don't forget that this sort of ban won't just mean that we cannot use the lead ammo to hunt, it will also mean that we probably cannot plink on our own land with it, because some of the lead might end up in the water table or be ingested by birds. Or some similar bullshit justification. And that your local shooting range will be forced to comply with increasingly stringent environmental regulations, which will force prices to go up or make them no longer economically viable. That will make the ordinary target practice that so many of us regard as a requirement for ethical hunting harder and harder to accomplish.
Some of you will say, "I don't care about that, I will shoot anyway." But most people want to be law abiding. Many people cannot afford the risk of not being law abiding.
The people in the Federal government who make policy are usually aware that an immediate and outright attempt to ban something will not work (at least with the current Supreme Court composition), but that they can easily gradually strangle something out of existence. Death by a thousand cuts. And if they can succeed in making it harder and harder to use guns legally and easily, they can get it down to where only a small number of wealthy and "respectable" people can afford to do it. And those people will be heavily regulated, but they will put up with it because they can afford to do that.
The future of gun ownership in America - on the current trajectory - is not an outright ban. It is to make American gun ownership look like European gun ownership. Something open only to well-heeled people who are willing to submit to bureaucratic regulation and interference and who frankly don't mind that the hoi polloi don't get to do what they do. Gun ownership and hunting thus becomes an exclusive club, rather than a pastime available to the common person. Those people will be like the English nobility who kept the peasants from being able to forage in the local woods for game and firewood. And they will be quite happy, because there will be a lot less competition for game.
On the worst form of that trajectory, they can cut gun use and ownership down to shut a small minority that there is no significant opposition to more aggressive measures.
Never mind that something like 70% of the environmental lead comes from small airplanes, which still use leaded gas.
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