doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com 2026 ban on lead shot in Uk

Quite the opposite here. I'm 88 and have mostly hunted diving ducks ducks over water since 1949. It was not uncommon to see ducks with green around the belly and vent that we were told later was an inedicator of lead poisoning. And yes they were lightweight and emaciated like the Ducks Unlimited article claimed. Since I began replacing my beloved lead 5's with steel 3's in the mid-80's, I can't recall seeing a 'green duck". That could possibly occur because we shot quite a few dabbling ducks when we were young. They feed close to shore in the shallowest water. I read about the forced ingestion experiments. I saw lead salts replaced by titanium salts in white paints. Then I read aout how swans had returned to the Thames after lead fishing sinkers were banned. So I bit the bullet and retired my percussion doubles. Sad, but if I erred it was on the side of wildlife, so that takes some of the sting out of it for me.

Why not Bi, Hal?

Why so helpful and proactive about pricing new shooters out of hunting and classic shotguns for your social agendas? What's wrong with going green, gonna start shooting bismuth out of your antique big bores, as the topic is a total lead ban. Don't you like sticking hundred of pounds of lead into the southeastern range of the kalicondor?

Craig, go back to your bottle.

I first learned about lead poisoning from a game warden on Sauvie Island, outside of Portland, OR, in 1969. Part of his job in winter was picking up 'greenasses', dead and dying ducks with green diarrhea running out their vents, the result of ingested lead destroying their ability to digest food; they starve to death. This was first described before 1900, so has been known for a long time. The slight additional cost of bismuth in my old fowlers is a small fraction of the cost of duck hunting, and its greater lethality makes cripple chasing uncommon.

We roll around in $80,000 pick up trucks, we dump $50 bills into the tank like they are nothing, and people will continue to [censored - come on man!] to the very end about buying bismuth shotgun shells, when they know they’ll use less than two boxes in an entire season.

Ain't that the truth. I no longer work with them because after I added this photo (and others from the series) to a wire service, they ran them. Of course, they ignored my captions about what was actually happening and concocted a ridiculous story about the 8 ounce owl trying to carry off the 15 pound badger.


The story is still up on their site after all these years. Wankers!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...carry-badger-twice-size-doesnt-hoot.html

Well said. I shoot steel out of my BSS, and have for over 20 years. And, I've got more than enough Bi for my vintage guns to last me another 25 seasons. I'll be 98 years old at that time and if I run out I'll look at pictures and read my journal from there on out.

My question is "Assuming a total ban on lead projectiles, ten years later, how could we possibly know the difference?"

The pro-banners have no answer to that, because they can't - because they haven't - currently demonstrate any harm to human health or any decline in the species they claim are being affected.

Has anything as massive as the lead ban - impacting millions, in this generation and successive ones, and costing billions - ever been done on such slender evidence.

There was ample evidence behind bans on leaded petrol, but that involved an active airborne compound, not an essentially inert element. Similarly, the harms of smoking were physiologically and statistically apparent. The same can be said of the difference between wearing and not wearing seatbelts: so none of these is a valid precedent or equivalent to a lead ban.

The ban has 3 drivers:
1 - anti-shooters, who want to score a propaganda victory and price poorer people (the majority, as they are well aware, since this is an almost universal truth) out of shooting
2 - supermarkets, who think their customers will object to finding lead shot in their poultry: a crucial obstacle for driven shoots who need entry points into the human food chain to maintain any degree of broad social acceptability.
3 - ornithologists, who are concerned that some species with gizzards may die from picking up lead along with grit or grains.

I would propose the following actions:
1. Push back and cast the anti-shooters as the enemy of the common countryman. Oblige them to quantify the harm.
2. Require commercial contracts between providers and sellers of game prohibiting the use of lead shot to enable the buyer to terminate the contract if lead is found. Commercial shoots dealing with picky sellers can then require shooters to shoot non-lead, and have an incentive to check. You might take this further, but always keeping in mind that non-lead is about supermarkets' marketing, not protecting consumers.
3. Require the ornithologist to collect species, locations and population data, and on that basis apply for localised prohibitions - no data, no prohibition.

The bottom line to this is that we should be asking the demonisers of lead projectiles to prove there is a problem, demonstrate its scale, and propose proportionate action to mitigate the harms.

And by the way, there is no safe level of... peanuts - you may think this is a joke, but it isn't: like lead, they directly cause a measurable and substantial number of people to die and be hospitalised by contact with them every year. Yet we haven't introduced a universal peanut ban. Perhaps that will give the anti-lead brigade something to do next...

This sums it up exactly ! Requiring game shoots to use steel shot in order that their "product" is saleable should have satisfied our very biased shooting organisations but instead they gave their full support to throwing us all under the bus in a pathetic attempt to appear even handed Unless of course you are an International clay shooter who can use lead with abandon. Shameful !