Ben, you keep posting stuff we already know--but you never manage to include "the rest of the story". Tungsten alloys are extremely effective, and "green"--and (Ben leaves out) about 10x more expensive than lead. Steel has gotten better, as established by the fact that you can now kill waterfowl a long ways away with it. Well, we all know steel is better now than it was 20 years ago. But "better" for a waterfowler means longer range kills. For an upland hunter, if one is pursuing birds like grouse and woodcock, or quail in the thick stuff, you don't want more range. What you want is an open pattern--and one that opens quite quickly. Steel shoots tighter than lead through virtually all chokes, making it harder to get open patterns at close range, like grouse, woodcock, and some quail hunters prefer.
Summary: Steel still isn't as versatile as lead. It remains more expensive--although not by as much as it used to be. (Although lead prices are still coming down.) And there are hundreds of thousands of shotguns (perhaps millions?) through which steel should not be shot--period. And although there are now steel loads available for the .410 and the 28, they are so anemic as to render those guns useless for much beyond shooting butterflies.
Not to mention the fact that gamebirds simply aren't dying off from ingesting lead--other than the occasional individual bird. (Doves may be an exception.) With all the lead we've spread around, if it were a problem for upland birds, then why have the Dakotas and Minnesota experienced pheasant harvests in 06 and 07 the likes of which they have not seen in 40 years or more? We're simply not seeing the same problems with upland birds that we saw with waterfowl 2 or 3 decades ago. Eagles have made an incredible recovery from low numbers of 2 or 3 decades ago.
Looks to me like further lead restrictions are a solution to a nonexistent problem.
