One of the back door ways the Gun Control Industrial Complex brain trust came up with for disarming law abiding gun owners was via the EPA. Most bullets are…what? Lead. Which can be toxic. Bingo! When a group of “environmental organizations” petitioned the EPA to unilaterally regulate ammo, the EPA decided not to touch that hot potato. So a sub-group sued the regulators last July demanding they ban all ammunition containing lead. Today, however, the DC District Court threw that suit out. Here’s the NSSF’s wonderfully schadenfreude-laden press release . . .

NEWTOWN, Conn. — The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia today dismissed a lawsuit brought by the radical anti-hunting Center for Biological Diversity and six other groups demanding the Environmental Protection Agency ban traditional ammunition containing lead components.

Traditional ammunition represents 95 percent of the U.S. market and is the staple ammunition for target shooters, hunters and law enforcement, with more than 10 billion rounds sold annually.

NSSF filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit last August. The court today agreed with NSSF that EPA does not have the authority to regulate traditional ammunition under the Toxic Substances Control Act.

EPA had already twice denied attempts by CBD to have the agency ban traditional ammunition, and the court had dismissed an earlier case brought by CBD seeking the same relief.

“We are gratified that the court has found this second frivolous lawsuit, which is essentially the same as the one dismissed last year, was equally without merit,” said Lawrence G. Keane, senior vice president and general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the firearms and ammunition industry. “This was a waste of taxpayers’ dollars and EPA resources spent in having to defend a baseless lawsuit.”

CBD’s serial petitioning of EPA and its repeated lawsuits were designed to cripple the shooting sports in America by banning the ammunition that millions of hunters and target shooters choose to use safely and responsibly.

“There is quite simply no sound science that shows the use of traditional ammunition has harmed wildlife populations or that it presents a health risk to humans who consume game taken with such ammunition,” said Keane. “Banning traditional ammunition would cost tens of thousands of jobs in America and destroy wildlife conservation that is funded in part by an 11 percent excise tax on the sale of ammunition. The protection and management of wildlife is properly handled by the professional biologists in the state fish and game agencies, as it has been for over a hundred years.

In addition to NSSF, the National Rifle Association, Safari Club International and the Association of Battery Recyclers intervened in the case.

Organizations that joined CBD in its lawsuit were the Cascades Raptor Center of Oregon, the Loon Lake Loon Association of Washington, Preserve Our Wildlife of Florida, Tennessee Ornithological Society, Trumpeter Swan Society and Western Nebraska Resources Council.

NSSF was represented by Roger Martella and Christopher Bell from Sidley Austin.

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29 COMMENTS

    • You mean missiles and other heavy firepower? Yeah, those emissions are pretty hazardous to one’s health.

      • Hey, if those weapons are not used in a well ventilated space,whew! The fumes could kill you!

        • It’s different when The Overlords do it. It’s not for us little people to question our betters. If they want to pollute the atmosphere and take out innocent civilians in the process, well, they must have a good reason, right? It’s for the children. Yea. That’s it. For the children …..

  2. But just think of all the lead we’ve harvested from the ground that we now have sitting in our ammunition cabinets.

    I know I’ve certainly purchased a lot more bullets than I’ve fired, so isn’t that a net removal of lead from the environment?

    • We should get a tax break for our homes being used for contaminant storage facilities.

      • I’m going to start selling lead sequestration credits based on the contents of my safe. Maybe I can get Al Gore to buy some.

  4. You missed part of the trick. If lead ammunition is banned, we’re stuck with lead-free ammo. The ATF considers most lead-free ammunition to be armor piercing. Civilian ownership of armor piercing ammunition for handguns is heavily restricted. It becomes a backdoor to prohibiting the use of handguns.

  5. The EPA is expressly forbidden to regulate ammunition. It would take an act of congress to change that.

    Not that certain agencies under this administration aren’t above skirting the law. The ends justify the means, you know.

  6. Grammar check: Threw, not through. (before the jump)

    Also, I’m disheartened, disgusted, and slightly amused that some of these people will try absolutely everything. At least they’re inconsistently persistent.

  8. Kind of related, but not really except in a tangential way….

    What would happen if you used your 3d printer to print the bullet too? Would a plastic bullet work at all?

    • Not very well…. but there are 3d printers that can output metal in the pipeline.

  9. “Work” maybe. Work well, no chance. Plastic is too light to retain kinetic energy over any useful distance.

  10. It would have really hurt to lose to the “loon lake loon association”./// That sure was a squeeker though, next thing you know our soldiers would be using foam nerf bullets, Randy

  11. If I may take another tack on this post, what about lifting the absolutely useless “non-toxic” regulation for us that hunt Waterfowl. Its been a scourge on my sport for decades and I can tell you more birds have been lost due to the ineffectual non-toxic loads than any unsubstantiated lead poisoning from stray pellets.

  12. “This was a waste of . . . EPA resources spent in having to defend a baseless lawsuit.”

    Having dealt with the nutballs at the EPA, I don’t see a downside to wasting their resources.

  13. It ain’t over yet. There is a bill pending I California to ban all lead ammo used for hunting. There is now a partial ban in Condor territory (that has had no appreciable effect on reducing lead poisoning of condors), and just BECAUSE it has been ineffectual, these guys think that it is necessary and proper to extend the ban to the whole state, so that maybe THEN it will be effective…..The fact that science does not support their proposition has not dissuaded the Legislature from moving forward.

    • Blaming hunters for the deaths of California condors is absolutely ridiculous. Hunters typically don’t leave large carcasses. The point of sport hunting is usually to take what you kill, minus whatever organs you leave behind after field dressing. Even then, a large game hunter is going to use less than 5 shots to make a kill – hopefully just one. Where is all the supposed lead contamination coming from? What are the condors eating? Has the state ever even proved any of this, or is it just like usual in California – someone has a “theory” and that’s all that it takes for a law to get written and passed?

  14. “Center for Biological Diversity”–I love it.
    Is it just me, or is it getting easier to spot BS Liberal “think”tanks?

    We should start the Kinetic Energy Children’s Defense Policy Resarch Institute.

    Either that or the Citizens’ League for Diversity in Protection

    • FTW. Imagine how many lib progressives would latch onto this just based on the name alone.

  16. Good, now the CDC and the medical profession should be barred from treating gun violence as a disease or public health crisis.

  18. Radical animal rights groups like the Humane Society of the US, Audubon California, Center for Biological Diversity, and Action For Animals are conducting a war aimed at the banning of sport hunting in California. One way they are trying to accomplish this is by sponsoring AB711, which calls for a state-wide ban on most kinds of hunting ammunition available to the public. Now, the same groups are trying to expand the ban to your state. These groups claim that scavenging animals, such as the California condor, ingest and are poisoned by pieces of metallic lead bullets present in gut piles of harvested game left in the field by hunters. They rely on certain scientific papers that allegedly support these claims, and often use the poisoning of the California condor to justify their anti-lead ammunition agenda.

    But there are serious scientific questions about the validity of their claims. The failure of the hastily-enacted California lead ammunition ban legislation of 2007 (AB821) suggests that these groups are wrong. AB821 banned the use of lead ammunition in the “condor zone” region of California. It was strong-armed through the legislature, bypassing the usual path involving the more scientifically inclined California Fish & Game Commission, based on the promise that the ban would lower the condors’ elevated blood-lead levels, and solve the lead poisoning problem. But AB821 has not resulted in lower blood-lead levels or otherwise reduced lead poisoning in condors. Despite the California Department of Fish & Wildlife’s acknowledgment that 99% of hunters are complying with the lead ban in the “condor zone” since the law took effect, condors’ blood-lead levels, poisoning and mortality have increased since 2007!

    There are obviously other sources of lead in the environment. These alternative sources are likely an industrial lead compound (e.g leaded gasoline, paint or pesticides), which is far more soluble and bioavailable to condors. We have identified some of those potential alternative sources, and we encourage you to join the hunt for the truth with us and learn the real facts! To learn all the facts in the lead ammunition debate, visit http://www.huntfortruth.org.

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