You chemistry majors are such a pain in the ass 🤣

The US has a lot of gun owners, but it also has a lot of people who don't own guns but are MAGAs anyway.

That's a much more acute form of lead poisoning.

airplane fuel is still leaded.

And all that lead in gasoline they had kicking around everywhere growing up.

We would shoot steel core but the government considers it "Armor Piercing" so its banned from import and from a lot of states... So its lead.

It’s from them licking paint.

huh. maybe the chemtrail people were onto something.

This just proves that broader economic trends exist, but especially cause how much it detaches at the end, yet increases in step this is obviously not causation, and is really only loose correlation

Most people don't handle airplane fuel

9 million people is still a lot of people, much less the kids playing with the 'bb pellets' in their closet and other exposures due to those 9 mil.

So that’s how they got dumber.

The divergence makes sense.

Children age out of the sample cohort, but still have high lead levels and still contribute to the crime cohort.

I'd expect to see the lead level rate be proportional to the birth rate and the crime rate proportional to the death rate. Having the chart extend another 15 years to today might show that.

Whenever I shoot I always make sure to either do it while wearing gloves and/or wash my hands with a specific soap that more readily removes heavy metal dust and residue.

Nah, I'm far enough left that I believe in getting guns back.

The danger from leaded fuels don't come from handling, but from the exhaust. The lead becomes breathable and enters the environment, exposing those who lived in urban areas and near roads to more lead than others.

The other poster isn't wrong about airplane fuel being leaded, but that can be misleading because most people don't know that "airplane fuel" and "jet fuel" are different. Jet fuel is not leaded, but the fuel used by small, piston-driven prop engines is.

Does the lead in the exhaust come down into the air we breathe? Lead is heavy. Would probably be more in cities with airports and under flight paths. Diluted of course, but repeated every day... Perhaps a tin hat or mask would help.

Lead ammunition is harmful to predator and scavenger species.

You are correct, but since some may read that and assume that all aviation fuel is leaded, I wanted to add more info.

Most people don't know that "airplane fuel" and "jet fuel" are different. Jet fuel is not leaded. The fuel used by small, piston-driven prop engines is. Because small piston aircraft still use leaded fuel, aviation is still the largest source of airborne lead emissions. The FAA is working to phase it out by 2030.

Yes, but jet fuel isn't leaded. Leaded avgas is by far the minority, unless you live right next a busy small airport.

I'd like to see this graphed against political leaning and opinions on things like gay rights or abortion.

Atmospheric dispersion is usually actually concerning good not bad, so it should dilute across the globe fairly quickly.

Air pollution usually becomes an issue when something like nuclear waste reaches the atmosphere, cause we ALL get to breathe in that nuclear waste.

But honestly some (probably large) percentage of meteors are lead deposited right to the atmosphere, cause its so atomically stable nearly everything decays to it.

So no matter what there's some lead in the soup, and I can't see jet fuel being a large contributer (to an already small amount)

That's a property of the copper jacket, not the lead core.

I have been pointing this out for like 20 years. Even with good sanitation and PPE, lead residue from shooting is surprisingly hard tocompletely eliminate. I was as shooting maybe a couple of times per week, primarily with a bolt action rifle and shotgun, wearing gloves, wiping things down, and I could still find detectable lead residue on my range bag, and in my car (!).

Someone who is putting hundreds of rounds per week of dog shit ammo through their AR is 1000% exposing themselves and their family to a slowly increasing background supply of lead.

Shotgun shot contacts the barrel, so there's going to be some creation of dust and rubbing on the barrel. The user will be exposed to that in the air and when cleaning.

Ok guys, can we leave OP's mom out of this for even one thread? This is serious.

Not unless you're oldschooling it hard enough to be using felt or cardboard wads and not a plastic shot cup as found in modern shells. Or unsaboted slugs, I suppose, which definitely contact the barrel. In the former case, you probably already have an impressive handlebar mustache and a large collection of brass shells, a keg of black powder in your basement right next to your keg of whiskey, and you're touching your shot all the time while you're handloading anyway.

Shotguns do, however, disseminate their shot all over the countryside when people hunt with them since statistically speaking only a rather small portion of the shot tends to actually hit the target.

Lead is very dense, so a bullet the same size delivers more force. Steel was an early alternative, and in addition to being less dense, it also tends not to deform into a mushroom shape during impact like lead and copper do. So a steel bullet can penetrate cleanly through a target leaving a narrower path and have a slower penetration and exit velocity, all combining to do less damage.

The density benefit is the same reason some high end rounds use tungsten and even depleted uranium. Heavier bullets of the same size fly straighter and hit harder.

Steel and copper also tend to cause more barrel wear than lead. Probably tungsten does too, but I don't have experience with it, let alone depleted uranium, lol.

It's still worth switching away from lead though.

Yeah but the jet stream takes care of any concerning concentrations of exhaust.

Even under 10,000 ft the atmospheric dispersion is orders of magnitude above surface.

The turbulence at the surface on a bad day can 'lock out' the upper atmosphere sometimes, which is extra dangerous for surface car exhaust - but is actually beneficial the higher your altitude vs ground.

So in all ways the ways airplane fuel would expose someone to lead, isnt experienced by the general populace. (minus directly handling the fuel, may have concentrated lead get on someone's hand/food, but thats another situation)

I've known a few that were certainly on something...

The Boomers grew up with EVERYTHING having lead in it, including the air thanks to leaded gasoline. Prolonged lead poisoning is almost surely a factor there.

Because it is very dense. A heavier bullet carries more momentum, will travel further for a given speed and be less prone to drift from wind, thus more accurate. Lead is just the cheapest densest stuff available. Bismuth is becoming the popular non-toxic alternative, but it is a fair bit more pricey than lead.

The sad part is that it's not that hard. No food or open drinks at the range, wash your hands/forearms with lead removal soap, change and toss your clothes/gloves into the washer with lead removing detergent. It's a ritual my household performs whenever we finish shooting and it means my preferred range clothes and gloves are always clean for the next visit.

Lead removal soaps and detergents are affordable and abundant. If you're exposed to heavy metals either through shooting or work then pick a few up.

Edit: also lead removal wipes! Super convenient when you're somewhere without water for washing. They come individually packaged as well.

Yes and no. I think the reasoning behind this often has to do with how the projectile behaves after striking the target. Generally speaking, a distinction is made between deformation-type and fragmentation-type projectiles, and, if I understand the arguments correctly, it’s assumed that lead-free projectiles don’t fragment as effectively or, in the case of deformation-type projectiles, don’t mushroom as well as lead-based ones do.
I don’t know if there was any truth to that when lead-free ammunition was first developed, but today that’s definitely no longer the case, and that argument is therefore invalid.

Someone on Lemmy wrote, a little over a year ago I think, that lead ossifies in the bones and then gets released into the blood as bones soften with age. This then affects the brain and might explain why older people have seemingly sudden personality changes. I think about this often.

I mean when you fire the round, the shot exits the cartridge and proceeds down the barrel, naked.

Well jet exhaust would be a very large contributor if it were leaded, but luckily it isn't. It's just piston powered prop planes that use leaded "avgas", anything with a turbine uses an unleaded jet fuel.

As it is, it's pretty bad, but it could be a lot worse. Airborne lead is really quite bad for many aspects of biology. If small planes stopped burning leaded fuel today, I'm quite sure we would be able to track a measurable difference in health and educational outcomes within a decade.

And the paint, don't forget the leaded paint. And the ceramic tile. And cosmetics. And costume jewelry. And pipes/plumbing. And pottery. And older vinyl, like blinds. And almost all older strained glass uses lead to hold the panels together. And even older plastics often contained lead to soften the material, and we all know how badly old plastic often deteriorates.

There's a shit ton of lead in products made before the turn of the century.

I hate that Gen-X is represented here.

Most people don't handle airplane fuel

I can't handle it. I get drunk immediately.

It is one of the processes of lead poisoning yes. Lead is mistaken for Calcium and stored in your bones.

You say this, but I can tell you that there are real people that follow that line of thought. Not a lot in the grand scheme, but they can vote just like anyone else. And that type of reasoning permeates everything they do.

No it doesn't. The shot cup and the charge of shot travel down the barrel as a single contiguous unit. The outer walls of the cup are what contact the barrel. The shot doesn't appreciably separate from the cup until several feet past the end of the muzzle when the petals of the shot cup are no longer restrained by the barrel. Separation is only able to happen when the cup encounters wind resistance out there in open air, and this is trivially verifiable by firing a bird shot shell at a paper target from only a couple of feet away.

This is all especially so with steel shot, because you definitely don't want that touching the inside of the barrel. I haven't cut a buckshot shell apart lately so I suppose it's possible that there are still commercial loads out there that just utilize a plastic wad with no cup, but birdshot shells certainly don't.

Edit! It was remarkably difficult to find a slow motion video of this in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1if2QKHWmU4

Thats a good point, I always get messed up on small aspects of statistics like that

Thats a good point, not even turboprops are leaded if I remember right.

Obviously it'd require a lot of study to definitively say the impact of the lead, but I'm convinced the impact wouldn't be able to compare to natural levels in that atmospheric environment. Like we love our planes, but its still energetically really difficult for us to get them up there - but space rocks can have a hard time NOT burning up in our atmosphere. And lead is a larger than uniform part of our universe because its atomic stability, so odds are (IMO) atmospheres relatively lead-y, but have been for centuries.

That and the difficulty creating hotspots in such a turbulent environment makes it required to increase the entire atmosphere's lead content to increase any one area to dangerous levels.

They might have grown up in a household with an active gun owner, which, when combined with bad hygiene practices after shooting, might cause lead to cause developmental effects.

Were your parents using guns on the regular?That is the important question here, because lead has very long lasting consequences.

(Btw, just having guns does fuck all against militarized police units)

lmao I am aware

1996 in the US.

Well, both really. As long as the metal is sufficiently softer than the steel of the barrel.