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Lead ammunition to be banned for hunting and shooting in England, Scotland and Wales
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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wp:Density#Various materials
The obvious answer is to use silver. It'll work on both ducks and werewolves.
Anyway, you forgot tungsten (19.3g/cm3, even geater than gold). Alloyed with steel as it usually is in shotgun shells it's like 14.9g/cm3, denser than lead and cheaper than using it pure.
Tungsten, for when the deer start wearing Kevlar.
Isn't tungsten harder to refine?
IIUC, silver cost less than $1 a gram—the rich can afford it—and I suppose it could be recycled.
Probably, but tungsten steel shotshells are already readily available.
The point of this is to not be broadcasting lead all over the countryside. Silver, gold, or otherwise, nobody is going to be able to pick up all the pellets from any shots that don't hit the target. And in shotgun hunting, that's most of them. Some ranges do dig up their backstops now and again and reclaim the lead, but in a hunting context that's quite impossible.
Thanks for the link.
If refining tungsten is less un-environmental than refining silver, then okay.
Oh cool, now do lost IQ points in children per gram
Eagerly awaiting the results for uranium.
Keep waiting.
Who's asking for legalization of civilian use of uranium ammunition?
Me, but no one will listen. I did manage to score some plutonium from The Libyans, though, so I'm good for now.
You better know how they found you or you get fatmanned again.
Libertarians
To be fair, if your aims good enough you can remove all their IQ points with just a few grams of lead
"aim is gettin better"
You can do it.
"each increase of 10 µg per deciliter in the lifetime average blood lead concentration was associated with a 4.6-point decrease in IQ" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4046839/
"cities/towns with more firearms had higher pediatric blood lead levels (highest quartile fully adjusted prevalence ratio ((aPR) = 1.18; 95% CI, 1.09, 1.30) with a significant increase in pediatric blood lead per increase in firearms" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S001393512300511X
Thank you. 🙂
What is the point of this ?
The legislation is referring to lead shot used in shotgun cartridges, which pollutes rivers and lakes. The mass is irrelevant.
It's not. Historically lead has been used in bullets and shot because it's both cheap and very dense. You need something with mass in order to impart energy on the target. If the mass of the projectile were irrelevant everybody would just load their shotgun shells with rice or something. Obviously it doesn't work that way.
I believe the consensus (based on the downvotes) is that the poster above is trying to tacitly make some kind of insinuation that lead is "necessary" due to its density in opposition to banning it, which I lightly debunked in my other comment. Other significantly less environmentally harmful materials are available and in fact already mandated in some areas for shotgun hunting.
Bismuth is also a popular substitute.