Food pantries in Iowa have been given approval to resume serving venison to the needy,” read the National Shooting Sports Foundation press release. “Earlier, anti-hunting entities had convinced state officials the meat was tainted by lead. Similar scare campaigns in North Dakota and Minnesota resulted in venison for the homeless being discarded.”

How serious was the “problem”?

“10 samples of ground venison from a food pantry were tested by the University of Iowa Hygienic Laboratory,” NSSF writes. “[E]ight had no detectable amounts and two had only trace amounts.”

For this, a laudable program was halted, and the most unfortunate among us were the ones who paid the price?

What’s worse, much of the “overreaction” was based on an unpublished, non-peer reviewed “study” by a dermatologist that failed to “scientifically establish the existence of a health risk.” Let alone consider that “for more than a century, hundreds of millions of Americans have safely consumed game harvested using traditional hunting ammunition.”


Haven’t you?
But environmental-cases and anti-gunners have teamed up to generate hysteria, and you are targeted in their sights. They’re counting on an uninformed public and uninvolved gun owners to succeed. And the strategy is working.

“Schwarzenegger pleases green activists,” read the San Jose Mercury News headline. “AB 821 … prohibits hunters from using lead bullets from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to reduce lead poisoning of condors.”

Despite, as NRA-ILA tried to make clear to the legislature and governor, “The lead ammunition ban cannot be supported by scientific fact.”

Indeed, a 5-year study presented in 2004 by the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech to the meeting of the Geological Sciences of America concluded, per Science Daily, “although the metal in lead bullets and shot corrodes rapidly in the natural environment, the lead becomes trapped in the corrosion products so it cannot easily migrate away … Lead is not very mobile. It does not wash away in surface or ground water.”

A supplemental study found “No evidence that birds were eating shot … [I]t does not appear to be a problem on this range [in the National Forest near Blacksburg, where the study was conducted].”

But like the saying goes, don’t confuse us with the facts. Reality doesn’t have anywhere near the glamour of, say, an outfit like the Natural Resources Defense Council (“The Earth’s Best Defense”). Sounds authoritative, doesn’t it? You’d never know it was a hobby for activist lawyers, hip corporate millionaires, artists, songwriters like James Taylor, and Hollywood dilettantes like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Redford, who sit on its august, if decidedly left-leaning Board of Trustees.

California, of course, foreshadows what is to come. Already, the extremist Violence Policy Center is exploiting ignorance and fear to recommend banning anyone under 18 from shooting ranges, to call for local “audits” to harass and close ranges, to ban the use of “assault weapons,” to mandate a moratorium on new range construction, and — get this — to halt firearms safety training because “any possible benefits … are outweighed by the risk of lead poisoning.”

This is what we all have to look forward to if gun owners don’t get the lead out and get involved.