Lead ammunition restrictions - government announcement

[Liveonce]

Expense - really?? How much do you spend on diesel, digital optics, clothing, tyres, new rifles, range fees etc. etc.

Ammo for any rifle is expensive. Cheapest 223 FMJ ammo I can find is now £35 a box of 50 cartridges. Lead bulleted 223 cartridges suitable for live quarry are well over £1 a shot. With any sort of premium bullet, £2 a shot. I recently paid over £60 for 50 Winchester 22 Hornet cartridges with very basic soft point bullets.

I reload. With my 243 or 7mm I am paying £50 to £60 for 50 lead free bullets. That’s just over £1 a bullet.

A basic lead bullet is about 50p a bullet. Non expanding monolithic training bullets are about the same price as lead bullets. Admittedly they are harder to come buy, and not available in all calibres and bullet weights. But where they are available they mimic the trajectory of the hunting bullets.

The serious target and gong shooters I know are running premium lead cored bullets - these are getting on for £2 a bullet.


Costs of primers and powder are still the same.

The cost of shooting has really only significantly increased since Covid and the wars, look back before that and it was
a lot cheaper an evening at a local club shooting 50 .22lr for a couple of pounds. Then a lot reloaded rifle ammo and shotgun cartridges and again that was a big saving on commercial ammo/cartridges. Especially for cartridges with some making their own lead shot for very little money.

Now many talk of £2 a shot like it’s always been that way and like it’s no big deal, may be not if you sell deer or are not of a fixed low income like a pensioner or minimum wage as many who shot pre covid were and are now feeling the pain.

 

[Chris Richardson]

Reaction in Rewilding Scotland FB page.

View attachment 427894

wouldnt shock me if those comments were made by some on here go BASC

 

[hendrix's rifle]

Expense - really?? How much do you spend on diesel, digital optics, clothing, tyres, new rifles, range fees etc. etc.

Ammo for any rifle is expensive. Cheapest 223 FMJ ammo I can find is now £35 a box of 50 cartridges. Lead bulleted 223 cartridges suitable for live quarry are well over £1 a shot. With any sort of premium bullet, £2 a shot. I recently paid over £60 for 50 Winchester 22 Hornet cartridges with very basic soft point bullets.

I reload. With my 243 or 7mm I am paying £50 to £60 for 50 lead free bullets. That’s just over £1 a bullet.

A basic lead bullet is about 50p a bullet. Non expanding monolithic training bullets are about the same price as lead bullets. Admittedly they are harder to come buy, and not available in all calibres and bullet weights. But where they are available they mimic the trajectory of the hunting bullets.

The serious target and gong shooters I know are running premium lead cored bullets - these are getting on for £2 a bullet.


Costs of primers and powder are still the same.

Once again, ignorant to facts

 

[Ratel]

Do you really think that a hot .22 using lead will perform better than a slightly larger caliber using non lead?
I shot deer with hot .22’s for over 20 years, they come with serious drawbacks, especially for the 3 larger species.

When in your neck of the woods could only use .22 centre fire. Never had any problems with killing the three bigger ones with a 22/250. Bullet placement does away with drawbacks.

 

[LuckyEddie]

So if a person was to shoot a deer in the lug, how would they know whether this new law had been broken?

Or the guy coming back from a successful stalk with 4 non-lead rounds in possession, but what was used on the deer?

Which force has the resources to verify the type of bullet used to kill a deer?

I can understand for the commercial market there being a way of verifying, but the lone stalker putting food on the family table?

 

[nun_hunter]

The question I'd ask is that if you can use lead bullets on certain ranges then how to you buy the bullets or complete ammo to use there if they are going to ban the sale of it?

If you are a target shooter and reload how will you buy the lead bullets you're allowed to use on the range to reload at home?

Seems like a ban on using them on live game but it'll be virtually impossible to stop people getting hold of them, especially as you can just buy bullets in bulk abroad and have them posted to you. Much the same as you could when expanding bullets were section 5 but you could still get them posted from abroad.

 

[Ratel]

With the likes of the 28 bore and 410, cheap steel shot cartridges not yet readily available in the UK. They are however available in other markets such Denmark and the US.

In the US a 410 loaded with tungsten shot is the new darling of Turkey hunters.

Currently in the UK Lyalvale do make a bismuth load in 28 and 410 3”. Expensive yes, but no more so than a 12 bore bismuth load.

For the 2 and 2 1/2” 410 it is currently a hand loading proposition, and even with Bismuth costs are not horrible.

Given that volume of sales of 410 and 28 bore cartridges are small compared to 12 and 28, UK manufacturers haven’t yet bothered to introduce other options to the market.

As for the 9mm garden gun, cartridges are similar price to 410. And are they really used in large volumes by any one. Given that most available seem to be European brands and lead bans are pending or in place - will they bother loading non toxic pellets, or will the 9mm Flobert fade away like many other obsolete cartridges. 100 years ago 14 bore, 24 bore shotgun and rook rifle cartridges were still catalogued. The 244 H&H was all the rage with deer stalkers and plains game hunters. Now they are not.

Here’s what I will do with my little old English double 410. I will enjoy it on clays till I have used up my stock of 410 cartridges. I might start loading Bismuth, but I have other guns to shoot game with that I also enjoy and they shoot steel very well. These are 80 and 100 year old 2 1/2” chambered 12 and 16 bore. I have been using for a while.
With the 410, cartridges are more expensive that 12 bore, so they are not really a cheap option to shoot for high volume clays.

Currently there is a huge premium on 410 side by sides of all types. Typically twice what you pay for a similar 12 bore gun.

Given the impending doom all these old English 410’s in wonderful unfired condition will become worthless and I will open up a retirement home for them. I might even go and buy a kg of No7 Bismuth shot to feed them with.

Meanwhile my own Jeffery 410 has quite pitted barrels - I rescued it. There was an article in the Double Gun Journal about converting a double 410 into little double rifle - 22 Hornet - mmmm

Years ago David Little had quite a stock of English .410's lined to hornet. My old Col had a beauty in K Hornet by Westley Richards. Used to shoot all his Roe with it.

 

[Heym SR20]

Can anyone point me to any actual evidence of the lead from shooting being a problem?
Other than the usual LEAD = BAD .

And air gun pellets are exempt because air gun shooters will not obey any law, and it will be impossible to police, according to the initial draft proposal to the .gov - so rifle and shotgun shooters are too law abiding and will blindly follow any law, it seems.

In a parallel universe called the real world there is plenty of evidence that lead in any for is harmful to living organisms. This is very well understood by the scientific and medical communities with plenty of supporting evidence. For years dangers of lead have been well understood by military and range operators - especially in indoor ranges. Indeed any packet of ammunition will contain warnings about the dangers of lead.

There has also been plenty of evidence put forward that demonstrates that lead is harmful to wild life, whether this ingested pellets picked up as grit or if eaten as lead fragments eaten as part remains or deer or birds that have been shot.

Indeed the shooting community, through the likes of GWCT, BASC have supported these real world findings.

What the pro lead groups have not done is produce the empirical scientific evidence to support that lead is NOT harmful to living organisms, that ingested lead is NOT absorbed into the blood and deposited into bones etc. They have plenty of time to produce such evidence but so far have not been able to do so. Or if they have submitted to the powers that be, it has been disregarded.

Below is the GWCT advisory note on lead that has been their position for a number of years.

Lead Ammunition - Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust

www.gwct.org.uk

However within the likes of the SD community there is a belief that lead is perfectly fine to use. You need to produce the evidence that lead is not harmful to man, bird, beast or plant and you need to produce it in a manner which we will be understood by the Scientific and medical communities and will overturn their widely held opinion, so we can all go back to use lead piping, lead based solders, lead paints and putties, lead in petrol, and lead in cosmetics and on whigs.

 

[Ratel]

Ah well, could be a return to my youth.

 

[Heym SR20]

Once again, ignorant to facts

How exactly am I ignorant of the facts.

Please do outline all your costs in shooting vermin and deer, and demonstrate that the additional cost will be prohibitive.

 

[Heym SR20]

The question I'd ask is that if you can use lead bullets on certain ranges then how to you buy the bullets or complete ammo to use there if they are going to ban the sale of it?

If you are a target shooter and reload how will you buy the lead bullets you're allowed to use on the range to reload at home?

Seems like a ban on using them on live game but it'll be virtually impossible to stop people getting hold of them, especially as you can just buy bullets in bulk abroad and have them posted to you. Much the same as you could when expanding bullets were section 5 but you could still get them posted

Simple - target shooters abide by the law.

Hunters - again abide by the law. If hunters are shown to be getting around the ban as you suggest, they will simply prohibit reloading.

Comments like this are just unhelpful and give yet more opportunities to challenge what we do.

Edit: thinking about it - don’t need to ban reloading, just ban the sale of primers and powder unless you are an RFD who is manufacturing ammo on a commercial basis.

As to ranges and policing of use of ammunition, it is and will be the range operator that will be liable - and it will be the club officers or company directors that will take this responsibility. For hunting it will be the landowner / occupiers, just as they are with any other form of pollution.

 

[Pedro]

Can only hope that this leads to ammo manufacturers doing more research to develop better performing non-lead alternatives. Or is that being too optimistic?

 

[Dunwaters]

When in your neck of the woods could only use .22 centre fire. Never had any problems with killing the three bigger ones with a 22/250. Bullet placement does away with drawbacks.

It does away with some drawbacks, but we morphed into a generation of neck shooters for sound reasons.
I’m not questioning that you can kill deer with a .22 center fire, I know you can, did it for decades, I’m asking why you’d want to move to one purely to keep using lead ammunition?
That just doesn’t make sense, whatever advantage you think you’ll gain from the lead ammo is more than offset by the downsides.
Just my opinion, but been there, done that and now have 2 bigger rifles firing copper.
The .22/250 and 5.6 are long gone.
No regrets.

 

[Kalahari]

The one thing that seems to have escaped a lot of the pro ban people, and particularly the people at BASC (some who seem to be disciples of John Swift and if they are not disciples why did they give John Swift life membership and did not allow any person to record a vote against the motion) is that as soon as this goes through the antis will use it as a stick to beat us with "you cruel shooters are using a less humane material to stalk with".

David.

 

[Smellydog]

No exemption for a guy who hunts with a muzzleloader??

 

[Dunwaters]

No exemption for a guy who hunts with a muzzleloader??

I think there was, I know I read somewhere that ML’s would be exempt because there are so few of them.

 

[Chris Richardson]

How exactly am I ignorant of the facts.

Please do outline all your costs in shooting vermin and deer, and demonstrate that the additional cost will be prohibitive.

remember that time a gent on here said hed been eating lead shot game all his life and been tested and he had very low levels of lead in his system , then you came on and said he had high levels ?? id call that ignorant to facts

 

[enfieldspares]

Is this not the proposed set of changes? Easily accessible and easily found. Yet as far as I see the supposed "authoritative voice of shooting" hasn't put a link to it here on SD? Merely a reference to a newspaper article. Not the actual YOU GOV website.

Link here:

Toxic lead ammunition banned to protect Britain’s countryside

New ban on use of lead in ammunition to protect iconic wildlife and clean up the nation’s waterways

www.gov.uk

Document here:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/686d2e3681dd8f70f5de3c92/UK_REACH_restriction_report_lead_in_ammunition.pdf

 

[opticron1]

Can only hope that this leads to ammo manufacturers doing more research to develop better performing non-lead alternatives. Or is that being too optimistic?

And that is the crux of the issue. If there was an effective alternative - and priced at the same level as the current lead content bullets, I think this would be a non issue.
It will, of course, be interesting to see if the various armed forces move away from lead......maybe try DU....that's a nice safe alternative....or not!

 

[Liveonce]

this from the GTA. exemption just for .22 rimfire is that the definition of small calibre bullets ??????


Stephen Jolly, chief executive of the Gun Trade Association, commented: “The GTA was instrumental in getting airgun pellets and .22 rimfire exempted from the ban. However, while we understand the rationale for lead restrictions in general, the shortening of the transition period is deeply unhelpful. It is likely to prove problematic for ammunition manufacturers whose job is to provide safe and practical solutions for shooters

GTA need to read the link enfieldspare posted as it’s not just .22 rimfire see section 35 of the document.