I know I'll get a lot of hate-mail and venomous responses to this opinion, but here goes.

The primary reason TODAY for lead bans is due to the varmint "hunter" creating a lot of bad press. To a secondary level, it is the big game hunter leaving his gut piles in the field.

The data is in and pretty conclusive in the Western USA as it pertains to raptors getting lead toxicity from bullets. Varminters go out with their lead bullets and slaughter entire prairie dog towns on BLM land, they clean up nothing, they delude themselves into thinking that wholesale slaughter of entire prairie dog towns is some noble land reclamation effort, and then they leave.

In the subsequent days, the raptors ingest the lead and die in fairly substantial numbers.

Those people and also the big game hunters leaving their gut piles are the primary cause of lead bans. There is good data to implicate their practices as destructive to conservation causes.

Now for waterfowl and water supply contamination? That on the other hand is a more dubious ecological argument against lead shot.

The mentality "we must hang together or we'll surely hang apart" is really the wrong way to go with conservation minded hunters concerned about lead. We need to shun the sloppy hunters that are causing problems and we need to reform our cleanup and mitigation practices from within...otherwise the long hand of government will further legislate us and we'll be unable to use lead for anything.