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What is your take on lead bullets?

4K views 64 replies 34 participants last post by  bmrtoyo 
#1 ·
Watching a video and a guy talking about the dangers of lead bullets. Never thought they were dangerous, well unless moving at a high rate of speed from a muzzle.
 
#4 ·
What bac said! I shoot lead bullets in my .45 reloads in G-21. I have a KKM bbl that I use most of the time when I'm shooting those.
 
#12 ·
I'm of the opinion the lead scare is BS.

As proof. I'm 79 and I'm sure most all of you have relatives or know people in this age bracket.

Through out most of my life I, and everyone else near my age, have lived in and around lead.
Our houses were painted with lead paint. Some older houses used lead water pipe and the later houses used lead on the copper water pipes.
Many/most of our toys were cast lead, or painted with lead paint. "Tin soldiers" were actually lead.
The chances are what a baby/small child chewed on was lead or painted with lead paint.

The auto gas had lead mixed in.

In short, lead was everywhere in and around us from the day we were born and much of our lives.

For many years I/we shot lead bullets in poorly ventilated indoor ranges.
For even more years I've cast and shot lead bullets, and still shoot lead, although I'm too lazy to cast any more.

Quite simple, If lead was a very small fraction as bad as it's made out to be none of us would have made it through our 25th birthday.
There just wouldn't be anyone alive from my generation.
 
#10 ·
I hope they're not dangerous, I've shot close to 100K of them and plan on shooting another 100K over the next several years.
 
#18 ·
Lead isn't good for you and anyone who spends a lot of time around shooting and guns should get their heavy metals checked periodically. Lead is REALLY bad for infants and children, so if you reload, keep all that crap away from the kids (at least the spent shells and the tumbling stuff).

The really bad news is of the stuff being spewed out the end of the barrel with each bullet, lead isn't the worst. There are other compounds that are really aggressive carcinogens, great news right?
 
#29 ·
Lead isn't good for you and anyone who spends a lot of time around shooting and guns should get their heavy metals checked periodically. Lead is REALLY bad for infants and children, so if you reload, keep all that crap away from the kids (at least the spent shells and the tumbling stuff).
+1. One of the things I like about the pin washing brass, is the lack of dust. Tumbling would generate lots of fine dust. Nasty stuff.
 
#21 · (Edited)
Some years back I was driving in town and on the radio they were talking to a government expert about heavy metal poisoning.

I perked up when he was asked about how bad Lead poisoning is since the government makes such a big deal about it.

The fellow said,
Since I work for the government I shouldn't say this but, Yes, lead can be some bad stuff...........if you eat it.

The fact still remains that my generation lived in lead but I've never seen anything showing that lead effected us any more than the following "lead free" generations.

But that doesn't mean I use it as a spread on my toast, or if I had a young kid I'd let it play with old lead toys. :)
 
#23 ·
I've loaded thousands and thousands of lead bullets. I don't have any issue other than I preferred to shoot them outside. I'm not a health fanatic but I don't like the idea of breathing in anything potentially harmful. I've been inside several indoor ranges that I didn't feel the ventilation was adequate. I've blown my nose after shooting inside and it was black. I figured that can't be good.
 
#25 ·
Back when I was growing up lead was everywhere and whenever you blew your nose if it wasn't black you knew you hadn't been working in dusty barns, coal piles, Grain bins, Husking corn, Cleaning machinery, dusty loam soil and other nice jobs. That go with hard work! Weld shops and factories among em.
 
#26 ·
I've been reloading and casting and shooting lead bullets since 1968 and I'm not dead yet. I take reasonable precautions and I think the "danger" is over-hyped like so many other things. Everything the "experts" say is bad for you, after about ten years they change their minds and say it's not as bad for you as they once thought it was, and then they come up with something new they say is bad for you, like Gluten.

As far as lead bullets in polygonal barrels, it's not dangerous for me because I clean my guns after I shoot them and the lead never gets a chance to build up, and neither does the copper.

I prefer lead bullets to copper plated bullets. And poly coating or powder coating is better than copper plating in my opinion and I think it may eventually replace copper plating simply because plastic is cheaper than copper.
 
#27 ·
I used to buy commercial lead bullets and never saw a problem with them, but when I moved back to town, and I joined an indoor range that bans unplated/jacketed bullets. At first I didn't like it, but went along with it.

Then I realized that (1) the plated bullets I was buying didn't cost much more than lead, and most importantly (2) my guns were much easier to clean when I got finished. WIN! WIN!.

I wouldn't go back to shooting lead if I could.
 
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#31 ·
When I started shooting, I was poor. I made bullets from melting wheel weights I got from the shop I worked at. These days I try to avoid it as much as possible. Range and competition guns don't get cleaned after every range trip. Lead just dirties the guns up much faster.
 
#34 ·
This is for the people that cast their own boolit.

I use a old Pro Melt, RCBS, it has a large flat surface
on the top of it.

Take some #10 cans and cut both ends out of them
and tape them together end to end. I used the aluminum
2'' wide tape that is also good for beagling a boolit
mold.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=beagling+a+bullet+mold

Place cans, chimney, on top of the lead pot, now the
smoke comes out above your head and not in your face.

You can use any long big tube for the chimney, cans is
what I had and works great.
 
#36 ·
I'm a few years younger then M2, but my generation like his was exposed to lead in all sorts of forms. I remember my dad telling me the new latex paints peeled eventually was because they took the lead out. I spent a summer while in College pumping gas at a Standard Oil station. Guess what the gas had in it? Lead.
We also attended schools full of asbestos, rode bicycles without helmets, rode in cars without seat belts or car seats, played with mercury ( I remember rolling it around in my hands, fascinated by it). My Dad taught me to shoot before I attended school, I played baseball without a cup.
Not saying we should go back to those days. But we weeded out the dumb a###s before they became adults.
 
#37 ·
When I lived in New England I shot a lot indoors and regularly got tested for lead. The levels in my blood regularly went up in the winter and reached unpleasant levels. I do not remember the numbers, but there were two levels of warning. I got letters from the town, as the lab was notifying local authorities. The letters warned me to check my home for lead paint and other potential sources of pollution, they were not about shooting. Once I stopped shooting indoors the problem went away, levels dropped to safe levels.

I shoot coated bullets exclusively, and use lead removing soap after each shooting or reloading session. Also, I recommend drinking dissolved Bentonite clay which bonds with heavy metals in your body and helps removing them. I buy it on Amazon. It's not a gourmet experience, you are basically going to be drinking mud dissolved in water.

Those who have kids should be extra careful, lead is a powerful neuro toxin that affects the nervous system of kids more violently than adults. As for the old chap who says lead is not an issue I would counter that my mother smoked all her life and died at 85 of leukemia. This does not make smoking cool at all. Lead is a toxin, deal with it intelligently.
 
#38 ·
Those who have kids should be extra careful, lead is a powerful neuro toxin that affects the nervous system of kids more violently than adults. As for the old chap who says lead is not an issue I would counter that my mother smoked all her life and died at 85 of leukemia. This does not make smoking cool at all. Lead is a toxin, deal with it intelligently.
I'm not saying that lead can't be hazardous, under the right circumstances. So can a lot of things.
What I'm saying is lead is no where near the problem that the government makes it out to be.

And as I keep saying, if lead was even a small fraction as deadly as it's advertised to be, all of us in the last two generations would be dead a long time ago from living with lead from birth.

Definitely all of us lead bullet shooters and bullet casters wouldn't have lasted any time at all. :)
 
#39 · (Edited)
I don't know where people get the idea that lead sporadic breathing of lead vapor would kill. It's in the ingestion of it that weaken the body over time.


No, that's not true at all. Lead can enter the bloodstream through your lungs just as easy as your stomach. Obviously, especially for kids, it more common to ingest it. I don't think anyone in this thread is talking much about lead killing people either. :dunno:
 
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