California has become the first state to enact a statewide ban on the use of lead ammunition for hunting



The California Fish and Game Commission are implanting the law in three stages:
1.On July 1, 2015, no lead ammo may be used to hunt in state run wildlife areas and ecological reserves.
2.On July 1, 2016, no lead ammunition can be used when hunting with a shotgun for upland game birds, furbearing mammals, and non-game mammals and birds.
3.A total ban on hunting with lead ammo goes into effect on July 1, 2019.

NO LEAD HERE

Figures.

Wow, hope this doesn't spread across the nation.

The idiots are running the asylum.

Just another fine example.

They have no clue what they are doing over there. I agree that I hope others do not adopt this.

Maybe we just need to Ban California from making any decisions!!! Seems like when they make bad decisions it falls down hill to the other 49?????

...the United States.

^ Fixed it for ya.

Is there any concrete evidence that shows lead ammo causes condor deaths or human illness from eating animals shot with lead bullets?

So I'm guessing there is no more traditional muzzle loaded hunting going on eh?

I can see the headlines now. Man gets off for shooting neighbor, but gets 10 years for using lead ammo.

Wouldn't a smart person dig out the lead bullet or fragments? Or is there enough residue to poison someone?

With condors, yes, there is plenty of actual evidence.

Any links to the studies? I have read there is a lot of faulty science behind this.

I have hunting buddies in California. What a PITA. It's not gonna stop them from hunting, I can guarantee that.

I doubt that will effect Texas any time soon! As much dollars that comes into texas
economy here, many millions that help us here, would not worry to much yet!

Guess that would depend on who occupies the white house next! We the people have that
control!

here is a quote from one of the Texas wildlife studys:

Decades ago lead shot was banned for waterfowl.

Dove hunters, though, have been allowed to use lead, and they use a great deal of it. Texas hunters kill about 30 percent of all doves taken in the U.S. each year, 6.4 million of them. Using the most conservative figure of 5 shots spent for each dove in the bag, that comes to 32 million rounds fired in Texas alone.

The average load is probably one ounce of lead shot per shell, most of which winds up on the ground. So we have something along the lines of 2 million pounds of lead that's being spit from shotgun barrels into the environment each year.

That much lead could be seriously damaging migratory birds, humans and anything else that lives in and around a dove field. We don't know. But Parks and Wildlife, when it began designing its lead study, chose to focus on the utility of lead vs. steel. Would steel or other nontoxic loads kill doves as effectively?

evidence shows that if you shoot lead that your Babies will be born naked & cant talk when born either!!!

Here is some information from Arizona Game and Fish - I wanted to not use anything related to California.

AZ Game and Fish Information

I know it is loads of fun to bag on CA and the sheer amount of idiocy that comes from that state, but not every single thing is necessarily bad or wacko environmentalist driven. We should be a bit smarter about things collectively than that.

I am not saying I agree with the lead ban at all (hell, i pretty much still don't agree with it for waterfowl), but I also recognize that different species in different environments have different tolerances and are affected differently by things such as lead than what we have over here.

Short answer - yes, steel and non tox will kill doves. Maybe not as effectively (in the case of steel) as lead simply because of physics, or in the case of most non toxic shots it will perform almost as well or slightly better due to heavier mass in the shot.

The biggest issue is that of cost - lead is easy and cheap to produce, steel is expensive to produce and we don't have the ample supply of shot or factory rounds in steel that we do with lead, and production facilities are not set up to produce the volume of steel that they can produce with lead today. And non-toxic shot is flat out expensive as hell.

Aside from the cost aspect, there are no studies looking at the potential for what happens when 2 million pounds of steel shot is introduced into an environment versus lead shot. Lead is fairly benign in terms of reactivity - it doesn't rust, corrode, decay, etc. and precipitate into the surrounding environment like iron does. It may well be that adding that much iron into the local ecosystems is perfectly fine, but it may turn out that introducing that much iron into ecosystems has detremental effects as well.

I read an article once, not from cally, about the amount of lead that would be injested in your lifetime of eating game you killed with lead core bullets, it was a little surprising. That's one reason I don't like bullets that grenade upon impact.

We can metabolize heavy metals out of our system - but it takes a while and we can only do small amounts at a time. It's not a case of where you injest a small amount of lead that it is in your body forever, so the "over your lifetime" types of things are generally done for shock and awe and usually don't reflect reality.

That's not to say that going out and gnawing on a lead ingot is a wise move, because it's not. But a 95 year old that ate game he shot all of his life doesn't have a chunk of lead in his body that has built up from eating game his entire life either.