“Choose lead free ammunition”
No?
Just stop shooting guns and murdering things like a crazy ape?
The American mind cannot comprehend this. Probably due to neurological symptoms from lead poisoning or sth
What are you even talking about? There are plenty of people that hunt even here in Germany.
Americans don’t have a monopoly on hunting.
I’m talking about a whole country being obsessed with owning and firing guns. I don’t observe that in Germany. Also a hunters license comes with mandatory education about responsibility and preserving wildlife.
So do hunting licenses in the US. Wildlife enforcement has some of the most authority in the state.
The issue is the states allow inherently unsafe munitions to be used. If they changed hunters in the US would comply
This is not exclusively an American problem. Eagles in the Italian alps are dying mostly of lead poisoning, too.
Ban lead bullets then. Allows people to keep hunting while preventing more pollution in the wild.
Plenty of time after that to ban other things.
Ban lead bullets then
Are you insane? These brave Eagles are dying to protect our freedom
They’ve been trying. I occasionally glance through the nra’s magazine because a family member is lust-addicted to the stories of people shooting others to defend themselves, and there have been little articles in their ‘defending gun rights’ section about lead bullet bans for at least a decade now. The nra and other gun lobbies have a lot of money to throw at the issue, and have actually overturned some of the bans, I believe.
This is partly why I haven’t got into air rifles, I have wanted to for a long time, but there is no good place to shoot it nearby.
Some may say that I should just go out in the woods and shoot there, but I don’t want to spread lead in nature.
I know there are lead free pellets, but I have heard mixed opinions about them.
Why an air rifle specifically?
Because I can get a low power one (10J muzzle energy) without a license, and I can’t be arsed to get a license for a proper firearm as it requires a fair commitment here.
If you just want to plink in your backyard then just get a BB gun that shoots steel BBs. And only use iron sights which will teach you instinctive aiming. I’d say that’s actually way more fun than a scoped air rifle. If you’re not going to be head shorting squirrels then you don’t really need the accuracy of a dialed in air rifle. Looking in a scope at a piece of paper and shooting the same hole looses its appeal pretty quickly.
Why is lead used at all? Why not steel?
Lead is denser, it weighs more per volume, so it travels farther and faster when propelled by an explosion. Uranium works even better, which is why they use depleted uranium in some military applications, as it’s more dense than lead, quite a bit better. Gold or platinum would work better too as they are heavier.
Fun fact, in a half billion years or so, the element of uranium decays into lead.
