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Most gun owners use lead ammunition, yet half don’t practice hygiene behaviors after shooting (hsph.harvard.edu)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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[–] 210 points 3 weeks ago (70 children)

Is it possible the political divide in this country is people with lead poisoning vs. those without it?

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  • [–] 139 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (31 children)

    Bruh they put lead in gasoline until the 80s.

    MAGA is 10% nazis, 10% cult members, 10% painfully-ignorant cunts, 69% lead addled boomers/genx

    and 1% rich fucks manipulating the rest of them.

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  • [–] 56 points 3 weeks ago (22 children)

    airplane fuel is still leaded.

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  • [–] 84 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    You are correct, but since some may read that and assume that all aviation fuel is leaded, I wanted to add more info.

    Most people don't know that "airplane fuel" and "jet fuel" are different. Jet fuel is not leaded. The fuel used by small, piston-driven prop engines is. Because small piston aircraft still use leaded fuel, aviation is still the largest source of airborne lead emissions. The FAA is working to phase it out by 2030.

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  • [–] 31 points 3 weeks ago

    You know what's funny? One of the "quirky" things about the Fallout Universe is how everything is radioactive because all their tech is based on fission/fusion right? It's meant to be funny like haha yeah our pollution is bad but atleast we're not poisoning ourselves with everything we do. Yet if you sub out "radioactive" for "heavy metal contamination" and "microplastics" etc that's basically 100% accurate to real life america.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 weeks ago

    Iirc locations downwind or under approach/depart flight lanes of small airports deal with an exposure risk fairly above baseline. I feel like I remember reading then that it ties into modern redlining where there are more minority populations in those areas due to cost of housing and the generational impacts of lead exposure.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    The danger from leaded fuels don't come from handling, but from the exhaust. The lead becomes breathable and enters the environment, exposing those who lived in urban areas and near roads to more lead than others.

    The other poster isn't wrong about airplane fuel being leaded, but that can be misleading because most people don't know that "airplane fuel" and "jet fuel" are different. Jet fuel is not leaded, but the fuel used by small, piston-driven prop engines is.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Just flew with 100LL, and I also clean up with anti-lead soap. I'm the only pilot I know who does this, but I can't wait to fly something electric ugh.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 weeks ago

    The politics and logistics issues holding back lead free avgas are extremely frustrating. I really thought we would have seen that transition by now.

    Who knows, maybe it will take electric aircraft to finally put an end to the issue.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    Well jet exhaust would be a very large contributor if it were leaded, but luckily it isn't. It's just piston powered prop planes that use leaded "avgas", anything with a turbine uses an unleaded jet fuel.

    As it is, it's pretty bad, but it could be a lot worse. Airborne lead is really quite bad for many aspects of biology. If small planes stopped burning leaded fuel today, I'm quite sure we would be able to track a measurable difference in health and educational outcomes within a decade.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago

    Well honestly, I have to admit, I'd never previously considered the amount of lead added to the atmosphere by meteors. But considering it now... only about 6% of meteors are the metallic variety. I had to look up what the average chemical makeup of these is like, but it appears that they're mostly iron and nickel, with lead making up a small percentage of the remainder, probably less than 1%. So all and all, it doesn't seem like they actually deposit all that much lead.

    Conversely, the connection between the use of leaded gasoline and lead levels in the environment is really very well documented and clear. We know that eliminating it from standard gasoline has made a profound difference. The volume of exhaust from small planes is of course dwarfed by the volume from cars and trucks, so the damage that's still occurring is significantly less, but it's still meaningful.

    So... I don't have any solid data for you here, but my intuition is that a handful of meteors probably can't add close to as much lead to the atmosphere as millions of vehicles burning leaded gas.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 weeks ago*

    lol no. Lead in the atmosphere is a problem, because if it's in the atmosphere, you are breathing it. Remember that next time you see a gas plant spewing out exhaust.

    Nuclear power plants will not exhaust anything except water vapor unless things go terribly wrong. Things going terribly wrong basically cannot release radiation with modern designs unless you were to bomb the core directly, with large bombs to defeat the containment building and massive amounts of stuff surrounding them...

    Fossil fuels are infinitely worse for everyone than nuclear, with or without lead.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    1996 in the US.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago

    IIRC farm co-ops, rural gas stations, bulk purchases for fleets, etc…

    I can remember my grandpa, a career trucker and grease monkey, grumbling about having to use lead substitute in his 60s Ford pickup when I was very young.

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  • [–] 54 points 3 weeks ago (9 children)

    The Boomers grew up with EVERYTHING having lead in it, including the air thanks to leaded gasoline. Prolonged lead poisoning is almost surely a factor there.

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  • [+] 24 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 10 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

    Eh, Gen-z who are chuds do of course hold responsibility for their own actions, but they were started down the path by really hard to overcome disadvantages previous generations had where family was present to socialize them, teach them how to treat others, previous generations had third spaces to socialize with peers to learn how not to be asshats, to learn what behaviors wouldn’t be tolerated, and the silent generation, boomers, and now gen-x (my gen) ARE guilty of one by one letting or actively helping all the structures that made socialization and generationally passed down behavioral guidance possible go away or be stripped by stopping the flow of corporate gains to the lower and middle classes, forcing families to all work, and sometimes all work multiple jobs, they voted against social programs, against traditional funding that built transportation systems, parks, and other third spaces by reducing taxation on the wealthy in the name of lowering taxes and the Ayn Rand myth of extreme self reliance.

    When you stop investing in society, you stop getting the benefits of a society, and the first to go is the social contract, where people treat each other with some level of respect due to acknowledgement of said social contract, for the most part.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

    This might be true if the investment in society, infrastructure and lower classes always had been the same or same direction. After wwii it changed drastically and in favor of the working class and those in need, and society benefited greatly from it, there’s datapoints to show this to be true. Then there was a backlash from the wealthy to all the civil rights movements, labor movements and those investments were pulled back strategically. This is new, because it isn’t a continual trend over time, but that pull back has continued from the 1970s to today’s date.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    I have been pointing this out for like 20 years. Even with good sanitation and PPE, lead residue from shooting is surprisingly hard tocompletely eliminate. I was as shooting maybe a couple of times per week, primarily with a bolt action rifle and shotgun, wearing gloves, wiping things down, and I could still find detectable lead residue on my range bag, and in my car (!).

    Someone who is putting hundreds of rounds per week of dog shit ammo through their AR is 1000% exposing themselves and their family to a slowly increasing background supply of lead.

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  • [–] 21 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    Someone on Lemmy wrote, a little over a year ago I think, that lead ossifies in the bones and then gets released into the blood as bones soften with age. This then affects the brain and might explain why older people have seemingly sudden personality changes. I think about this often.

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  • [–] 36 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

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  • [–] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (6 children)

    This just proves that broader economic trends exist, but especially cause how much it detaches at the end, yet increases in step this is obviously not causation, and is really only loose correlation

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  • [–] 16 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

    The divergence makes sense.

    Children age out of the sample cohort, but still have high lead levels and still contribute to the crime cohort.

    I'd expect to see the lead level rate be proportional to the birth rate and the crime rate proportional to the death rate. Having the chart extend another 15 years to today might show that.

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  • [–] 25 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

    The "Super gun owners" account for only like 3% of Americans. And a lot of those still don't shoot enough to meaningfully manifest the symptoms of lead poisoning on its own.

    It's probably just medical advances letting bitter racist old fucks live longer.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Old fucks who grew up with so much lead in the atmosphere from burning gasoline that the lead from a few recreational bullets is just noise.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 weeks ago

    And the paint, don't forget the leaded paint. And the ceramic tile. And cosmetics. And costume jewelry. And pipes/plumbing. And pottery. And older vinyl, like blinds. And almost all older strained glass uses lead to hold the panels together. And even older plastics often contained lead to soften the material, and we all know how badly old plastic often deteriorates.

    There's a shit ton of lead in products made before the turn of the century.

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