Les sends me this kind of strange article:
The idea of a bullet designed both to kill the enemy and be kind to the environment might sound like a macabre joke. In combat, soldiers don’t usually worry about the green credentials of the enemy.
But armies in Scandinavia are so concerned about the pollution caused by lead bullets they’re replacing their entire stock with non-toxic versions. The manufacturers are encouraging the British armed forces to do the same.
But is there really a case to go lead-free?
“If you’re getting killed by a lead bullet or lead-free it doesn’t really matter, but most ammunition is used for training anyway,” explains Urban Oholm, senior vice-president of Swedish arms manufacturer Nammo.
First let’s talk about why Lead is so popular in the making of bullets. First its soft. This means it easily conforms to the rifling of the barrel, and then it deforms on impact allowing for better terminal ballistics, and its heavy, making it better for transferring kinetic energy. Using these two factors, gold would also make VERY good bullets….but we know why lead is preferred, its CHEAP!
Now I have my doubts about the whole environmental factor. I know my gun club hires a company to rebuild the berm every few years, and no money is exchanged. NONE. Why? Well the arrangement is that the company can keep all the lead they recover from the berm and sell it. See the lead bullets just bury themselves in the dirt…and it just sits there. Lead is relatively inert in its elemental state. As far as health of the shooter, well you’re getting more lead exposure from the Lead styphnate in the primers than the lead in the bullets.
Also “lead free ammo” is nothing new. Big Game hunters have been using brass or bronze monolithic bullets to get maximum penetration on big animals because the alloy is so much harder than lead. Also military has been making ammo with a steel core for ages. You see lead is cheap, but crappy steel (like the garbage they make rebar out of) is REALLY cheap. Also the manufacturing process is differed. Lead ammo is often swaged into a die with the jacket, or cast and plated, steel core ammo can be made simply by cutting a steel wire to the proper core length and the pressed into a jacket. So steel core ammo has been around for a while, and if you collect military surplus ammo, you’ll often encounter it.
I dunno, seems like a bunch a-do about nothing.
Except the banners see it as a handle with which to beat gun-owners.
If they can’t ban guns they’ll ban ammo.
If they can’t ban ammo they’ll ban ranges.
If they can’t ban ranges they’ll ban transferes.
Also note the pressure to ban lead ammo because it’s toxic, and to ban alloy ammo because its “armor piercing”.
What’s left? Yeah, that’s the point!
WE know that lead isn’t quite the huge deal that the EPA and greenies make it out to be and that the solutions are pretty much old news, but these European governments will spend rediculous amounts of money “solving” this problem to get approval from their, shall we say, less factually-oriented people. Personally, I wonder if this means we’ll be able to see a whole bunch of fairly new production surplus ammo for cheap or if they’ll just use up stock and just replace with the new stuff as they go.
Actually, the Treehuggers have been doing the same thing to our Military. “Green Ammo” is in the inventory for Training, and the Navy is being ordered to use “Green Fuel” in the Fleet, at a cost of 3-5 times as normal Fuel.
Meanwhile, the ChiComs and the Iranians are spending their Military Funds on Stealth Fighters, Aircraft Carriers, Missiles….
If lead was as toxic as they make it out to be then there should be a vast swath of land in France where nothing grows.
Yet former sites of the trenches are farms and nobody’s dying from eating the crops.
Almost as if the greenies are lying, isn’t it?
Yep….those poor, poor Europeans…living in that lead infested hellhole of Central Europe…exposed to all that lead shot in the area since 15th century. Those poor French, living among that lead in the French countryside from WWI and II…..Germans….poisoned by all that lead from the Thirty Year’s War, where the bullets were huge balls of elemental lead.
We MUST stop the madness. Quick! Invent laser rifles NOW!
Since the 15th? They were using lead shot earlier than that. There are lead sling bullets in the British Museum with “Take That!” in Greek engraved on them.
More likely they’re greening the ammo for the same reason the US did. The old NATO standard round (M855 in the US) sucks and we used “greening” our ammo as an excuse to develop one that doesn’t. Nobody is going to vote against the environment. This is why M855A1, the green round, is being pushed out to the field as fast as possible and not used on US training ranges.
I seem to recall that they ran into a nasty problem with the ‘green’ tungsten bullets: fragments in tissue caused tumors to grow. Rapidly.
‘Course, if it’s not lead and it makes parts of you turn green, I guess that’s a double…