Originally Posted by
Buck Shot
At the risk of appearing to be stalking you, Soundguy (honestly, I'm not), I gotta comment on this notion.
This is the exact same strategy the anti-gunners used about 10 years ago, when they set out to ban all lead ammo (and I believe they succeeded in California). They claimed that when game animals are hit with bullets containing lead, the lead bullet fragments into a bajillion pieces and (somehow) that lead goes everywhere throughout the animal, kinda like X-rays or gamma rays, and no matter how well you try to fish it out when butchering the animal, lead gets through and goes into your food. Or supposedly.
Then they concocted some "studies" to prove that hunters who consumed wild game had higher lead levels in their blood than those who didn't eat wild game.
The only problem is that they "cherry picked" their data, and lost in the results -- and only very rarely reported by the anti-gun, anti-hunting media -- was the fact that the kids in their "study" who ate NO wild game actually had higher lead levels in their blood than kids who regularly ate deer, etc. OOPS!
Point is, it's not hard to keep bullet fragments out of your food, whether they're lead, zinc, bismuth or unobtainium. If it's deer, you don't use the meat near where the bullet passed through, which isn't difficult since (with j-bullets at least) the lead-tainted meat is generally a bloodshot mess, and you'd have to be mighty hungry to eat it. As for small game killed with lead shot, if I'm not mistaken, even if you swallow a few pellets, they won't elevate the lead in your blood much because the particles are too big -- it's the tiny fragments with lots of surface area that you want to avoid (like the powdered lead oxide in old paints).
I suspect that we bullet casters inhale and swallow far more lead in our casting activities than even somebody who eats nothing except lead-shot wild game...which may be one reason (some) hunters in the study mentioned above had higher blood lead levels than the general population...