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Posted on 09/24/2026 9:09:47 AM PDT by Paal Gulli
President Trump signed an executive order Thursday expanding the amount of federal land available for use by hunters and fishermen and removing years of anti-hunting regulations.
The White House noted that the order erases years of regulatory actions that targeted lead ammo and fishing tackle....
Link to the EO itself:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/09/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-reinvigorates-americas-hunting-heritage/
"...The Order directs the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of War, and the Secretary of Commerce to propose changes to polices that prevent access of public lands for recreation, infrastructure repair, and wildlife management, as well as to encourage volunteers to manage wildlife populations and invasive species, allow the use assistive technology on access trails and hunting locations for people with disabilities, and allow the use of traditional lead ammo and tackle...."
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
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Lead always as been the optimal answer for firearm projectiles because:
1. It's cheap.
2. It's soft (1.5 on Moh's), malleable and somewhat ductile. It's easy to form into projectile shapes, and easily alloyed to produce optimal deformation based on velocity at impact.
3. It has an uncommonly high specific gravity, ~11.35. Which means high mass in a relatively small projectile, and penetration favors mass.
Like so many loopy ideas, the campaign against lead was begun in Kommiefornia, where their Ouija board told them that lead was damaging the ecosystem because hunters were killing game animals using lead-based projectiles, then abandoning their harvest to be eaten by scavengers. And being dumb animals, the scavengers eat the carcass, lead and all. Or so says the Ouija board.
The ammunition industry turned backflips to find suitable alternatives. The primary substitute they came up with for shot shells were (in increasing order of both cost and density) steel, bismuth and tungsten. All cost significantly more than lead, and only tungsten beats lead in terms of density. With steel and bismuth, in order to get the same range and penetration as with lead, hunters are faced with choosing a larger shot size (which will tend to provide less than ideal coverage at their preferred ranges) or stick with their original shot size and have it slow all the faster due to aerodynamic drag (which reduces penetration).
The industry found different substitutes for lead bullets (fiream projectiles), most of which are based on copper alloys. Some are quite effective in terms of matching the terminal performance of lead, however, copper is considerably more expensive than lead.
Copper also is significantly less dense than lead with a specific gravity of just ~8.89. This means that copper-based bullets have to be significantly longer to achieve the same projectile weight as lead-based of the same weight, and a longer projectile is more difficult to stabilize. In some cases shooters find the rifling in their existing firearms too "slow" to stabilize a copper-based projectile of the same weight as the old lead bullet they were using previously with great success.
What all this overlooks is the real reason why the Environmentalist Wackos wanted lead banned. It makes ammunition universally more difficult to manufacture, more expensive to buy, and it imposes further restrictions on the game and fish sports.
It's the death by a thousand cuts. Inflict injury on the firearm community any time you can, any way you can.
Note that I'm not arguing that some lead projectiles weren't environmentally unwise, particularly in hunting waterfowl. The problem is they're painting with too broad a brush and damning all lead as universally evil. It's the same treatment they've given fossil fuels and CO2. They're universally evil because they say so.
The EPA already drove all the lead smelters out of the country or out of business. The ammunition industry now relies entirely on recycled lead, mostly from discarded radiation shielding used in science, industry and/or medicine.
I also note that Trump45/47/48's words in the story don't have the ring of a full-throated endorsement of his own EO. He's already driven the bump-fire stock industry into bankruptcy -- literally. And he once publicly stated, "I don't like silencers at all." So I wouldn't call his support of 2A exactly "rock-ribbed."
Yet now both bumpfire stocks and silencers are alive and well, despite Trump's dislike for them. And silencers might soon be sold over-the-counter, not only without a $200 tax stamp but also with no more falderol than buying a plain old firearm and NO WAITING PERIOD.
I think what's happened is Trump got stung by the blowback from the 2A/RKBA community over both the bump-fire and silencer missteps. And somehow in all this, some advisors came to his attention who he thinks he can trust (and maybe must trust) in these matters because he is -- let's face it -- largely ignorant, both of firearms themselves and the laws governing them.
The statements to the press he made with this EO tell me he isn't really sure why he's done what he's done. Which begs the question, then why did he do it? The answer could be that he's ceded his decision making to his newfound advisors because they have fuller understanding of the future implications of his 2A decisions than he himself.
And that I think is the most newsworthy aspect of this EO, because it bodes more positive RKBA moves in the future.
God bless PResident Trump!
So will this free up people to fire up smelters again?
What about fishing sinkers?
Does anyone know what Obama did with the 6 million rounds of ammo he bought?
Might as well bring back lead paint too, you know for the kids!
doled them out to the antiwhite extremist groups obviously
Great news!
Because others get to eat the lead bullets, but they’re too big for the kids to eat? That really doesn’t make sense. And it made no sense to ban lead bullets in the first place.
My idea was that a list of every executive order or policy initiated by both Obama and Biden along with every appointment they made and every promotion granted in the military or executive branch agencies should be compiled. These should all be reviewed. Then systematically they should all be reversed and everybody they ever appointed or promoted should be fired.
On Day ONE. In an all out MAGA Blitzkrieg.
Why was this allowed to last for an additional 2 years before choke slamming it into 180 degree reverse?
I take it you ate a lot of
Kids are not going to go searching for spent lead to graze and snack on,,,,,good grief man.
Lead is a naturally occuring substance that didn’t kill earth before it was out of the ground and isn’t going to kill us using it for bullets.
It’s not like he’s making it legal to make paint our of it or put it back in our gas.
Shotgun shells, yes. That lead is a problem, as it sprays everywhere. Two pellets may kill the target, but the other 100 went rogue, small enough to be consumed by other wildlife such as Condors, cranes, water fowl, ground birds, fish, and reptiles, that are effected by lead toxicity because they eat the stray shot over time. Then it goes up the food chain.
Oh, puhleeze. Totally different risk paths and consequences.
Conflation worthy of a commie trash CCP bot.
Cheap 3 1/2” turkey loads are what I’m after
If it’s birds you’re worried about, then cats are a bigger problem than led. Animals aren’t stupid; they know he difference between food and non-food. Big birds like condores don’t peck for rice. They tear off chunks of meat from a carcus. It’s not like every animal on earth is lead loaded! Geeze!
Cats kill millions of birds every year, lead bullets don’t.
There has been a ban on lead shot nationwide since 1991 - a patchwork of individual states for several years before that.
I guess, assuming this stays in effect, we’ll see what difference it makes.
In my experience there are definitely more than two pellets in a typical bird. But it is fair to say that only a small fraction of the pellets hit the bird.
Is a 3 1/2” turkey even worth the effort to dress out???
Just kidding.
I think turkey loads should be among the first to go back to lead-based.
It's funny you could always get lead buckshot loads; 0, 00 & 000. Even buck-and-ball. Nobody seems to care that the poor cannibals could be getting lead poisoning. /sarc
I just bought lead sinkers.
Lead shot is only ban for waterfowl hunting even then the study that got it all started is of dubious nature.
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