"But how did the fight over lead bullets thwart efforts to regulate lead fishing tackle? Many hunting and fishing organizations have ties to the NRA, and they maintain that any effort to regulate tackle will open the door to regulating ammunition, and that any effort to regulate ammunition is an assault on Americans’ gun rights.

“One of the unusual things about lead is there are very few other toxic materials that have a huge public lobby in favor of them,” Pokras says. “You don’t see a lot of members of the public out there campaigning [for] more DDT or neonicotinoid pesticides. But with lead there’s a huge, wealthy, politically influential contingent supporting it.”

I fucking hate it here. I love loons.

I grew up somewhere hunting was an important part of the local culture, and I learned to hunt at a young age. We often chose copper bullets rather than lead for performance reasons. A ban on lead bullets would not make hunting meaningfully harder. Copper costs more, but if ammunition cost has a significant impact on someone's ability to hunt, they're doing it wrong.

A ban on lead practice ammunition would have a significant impact, but the article does not discuss that.

It's bizarre to me that loons were hated and killed for fun. Just for how they looked?

I'm from Vermont and yeah when I was a kid we used lead sinkers without a second thought. We breathed it out of car exhaust without a second thought too. Today I can't think of any behavior easier to change than throwing a poisonous element into the environment for sport.