LITTLE ROCK — Since the Supreme Court seems to agree that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms, gun haters are trying a different tactic.
They want to ban lead bullets on the false premise that they're a public health hazard and also hazardous to endangered bird species, like the California condor.
A joint news release from the American Bird Conservancy and the Peregrine Fund noted that studies of several bird species have provided "extensive documentation" of the health hazard posed to birds that ingest lead ammunition residues in the remains of gun-killed animals.
That's the jab. Now for the hook. "New studies suggest that humans who eat game shot with lead ammunition may also be at risk," the release continued.
Help me out here. How many centuries have people safely eaten gun-killed meat? Regardless, the news release added that state health officials in North Dakota recently ordered food banks to discard donated venison because it "can" contain lead fragments.
In response, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association representing the shooting, hunting and firearms industries, issued a counter statement that said, "There is absolutely no peer-reviewed scientific evidence to support the unfortunate and unnecessary overreaction by health officials in North Dakota to have food pantries discard perfectly good meat because it was taken with traditional ammunition."
Dr. William Cornatzer, a Bismarck, N.D., physician and a member of the Peregrine Fund board of directors, claims to have hunted and eaten venison for more than 30 years. He recently ran CT scans on 100 1-pound packages of frozen venison, and some of the packages may have contained lead fragments. More on that in a minute.
Wildlife biologists are convinced that lead shot in the No. 7 to No. 9 sizes are dangerous to birds like dove and quail because they're the same size as the seeds and grains those birds prefer. However, this particular issue isn't about lead shot. It targets lead bullets fired from rifles. The Peregrine Fund is concerned that lead bulletsfragment into hundreds of tiny pieces when they hit game, and that these pieces scatter widely into the meat along the bullet's travel path.
Not exactly. When a big game bullet hits a deer, it expands into a mushroom shape. The transfer of energy from the bullet to the target causes extensive hydrostatic damage to the soft tissue. The shock wave from this energy transfer causes massive and fatal hemorrhaging. However, most hunters aim for the heart/lung area, where a bullet does not contact the shoulders, hams and tenderloins, the parts traditionally known as venison. With this shot, bullets usually exit the body and remain largely intact.
The only bullets that explode are the frangible, smallcaliber bullets used for hunting woodchucks and prairie dogs. A standard big game bullet in the .270- to .30-caliber rangeweighs 130-180 grains and travels 2,600-3,000 feet per second. A .22-caliber varmint bullet weighs 40-50 grains and can travel in excess of 4,000 feet per second. That's almost 2,750 mph. When a lightweight, lightly constructed bullet hits a target at that speed, it vaporizes most of the target. Hunters do not always recover these animals, so scavengers sometimes do eat them. Even then, bullet fragments probably don't remain in the small chunks of tissue that remain. Also, varmint hunts are confined to small locations, so it's not like gun-shot rodent carcasses are scattered all over the country.
Curiously, the news release provided no estimates for the number of raptors that die from eating lead-tainted meat from bullet residue. That's because no such numbers exist. If it happened once, that constitutes a crisis in some quarters.
It is possible that some North Dakota hunters may have removed the choicest parts of their venison and donated damaged or marginal meat to the food banks. Also, donated venison is ground into hamburger. If venison contains a chunk of lead, the grinder might reduce it to shavings and contaminate the entire lot.
Both scenarios are easily remedied, but that isn't the point. The point is that many national "conservation" groups are composed of people who intensely dislike both hunting and firearms. The Supreme Court will soon confirm the right to keep and bear arms, so attacking gun ownership is a dead end, as is using the judicial system to persecute firearms manufacturers.
Targeting ammunition as a health hazard is the next frontier. It's just a different path to the same destination.
Sports, Pages 45 on 05/11/2008