In his second day in office, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke revoked an order issued on the last day of the Obama administration, which sought to expand the use of nontoxic ammunition and fishing tackle on lands managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and ban the use of lead ammunition on national wildlife refuges by January 2022.
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Order 219 was signed by outgoing FWS Director Dan Ashe, who said the action was necessary to protect wildlife.
“According to the U.S. Geological Survey, lead poisoning is a toxicosis caused by the absorption of hazardous levels of lead in body tissues,” wrote Ashe. “Exposure to lead ammunition and fishing tackle has resulted in harmful effects to fish and wildlife species.”
Order 219 was issued January 19, 2017, and has since been expunged from DOI and FWS websites.
No Consultation
In the revocation, Zinke said Order 219 was not mandated by any existing statutory or regulatory requirement and was issued without significant communication, consultation, or coordination with affected stakeholders.
“This was a reckless, unilateral overreach that would have devastated the sportsmen’s community,” said Chris W. Cox, executive director of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action. “The Obama administration failed to consult with state fish and wildlife agencies or national angling and hunting organizations in issuing this order. This was not a decision based on sound scientific evidence—it was a last second attack on traditional ammunition and our hunting heritage.”
Alternatives Available
“While the issuance of the Director’s order triggered complaints from sportsmen’s groups regarding lack of consultation, the fact is that the use of lead ammunition is simply unacceptable in this day and age, when there are readily available alternatives on the market and we know the incredible harm that lead poses to people and to wildlife,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife. “Lead ammunition and fishing tackle poison and kill many millions of birds and other animals each year, and risk contamination of our waterways and drinking water.”
Zinke’s order is here.
The timing of Ashe’s order on the last day of the Obama administration tells you all you need to know about the purely political motive and purpose of his irresponsible action. The fact is The science of wildlife management is predicated on managing species populations to prevent harm to individual animals in the species. There is no sound science proving the use of traditional ammunition and fishing tackle is having an adverse population impact on any species that would warrant Ashe’s blanket ban. Get the facts on traditional ammunition here – http://www.nssf.org/factsheets/PDF/TradAmmoBackground.pdf.
National Shooting Sports Foundation, I see. Thanks for the single citation. I read it the pro-shooting article denying facts. How 2017.
Now, allowing me the same courtesy, read some scientific data to rebut NSSF’s biased, alt-fact article.
https://www.nps.gov/pinn/learn/nature/leadinfo.htm
http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/campaigns/wildlife_abuse/toxic-lead-ammunition-poisoning-wildlife.html
https://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/disease_information/lead_poisoning/
http://www.lead.org.au/lanv1n2/lanv1n2-8.html
http://www.rst2.edu/ties/LEAD/university/resources/experts/leadinanimals/animal1.htm
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1306945/
http://pods.dasnr.okstate.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Rendition-12064/unknown (EPA’s Pruitt’s state)
http://www.winchester.com/library/news-feed/Pages/LeadAmmosImpact.aspx (Even Winchester Ammo weighs in)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wild-game-deer-venison-condors-meat-lead-ammunition-ban/
And on and on and on and on and on . . . . .
If you still deny facts after reading even just ONE of those citations, not to mention the hundred of others available to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, then stay comfy on a flat Earth.
I always have some sympathy for the poor, misguided folks who think that they can improve public safety by persecuting their neighbors who like to go hunting or fishing. It seems perfectly reasonable to pass all kinds of Draconian sanctions against us for owning guns, but in the real world it does not do anything at all about criminal violence. The one time that I had a chance to meet one of those liberal professors who write papers about such issues, he said that he and his colleagues, being good liberals, and gun control being the acid test of liberalism, applied for a grant with the plan that they would go through the statistics and establish the foundation for gun control once and for all, but they found instead that there wasn’t any. An ammunition ban like this one is just a substitute for laws that they have not been able to pass the regular way, and it shows clearly why executive agencies that were created for the express purpose of passing laws that Congress believed itself to be unable to pass are so dangerous.
“…gun control being the acid test of liberalism…”
Wrong. i stopped right there. The rest is based on this premise which is false. I am a liberal and I would bet I own more guns than you do. If people on the right would simply think critically before stating an obvious lie/alt-fact, then conversations could progress. This one just stopped.
I am totally irresponsible, I was just quoting what the liberal professor said 🙂 I commend you for your perspicacity, owning all those guns, probably having lots of fun with them. We were at U Mass Amherst at that time, and I asked him if I could still cite his work as coming from a Certifiable Eastern Establishment Liberal University when his conclusions were so conservative, and he assured me that he was still plenty liberal, having written his master’s thesis on political alienation and his Ph. D. thesis on the Viet Nam War, and went on to comment on their results. So, maybe it’s just Massachusetts liberals who try to find reasons to justify restrictions on having guns. It does seem to be mostly liberal Democrats who keep trying to invent a gun control law that will reduce criminal violence, and I do wish the liberals in politics and the news industry would pay attention to their fellow liberals in academia, and maybe someday they will. When Florida and some of the other early states were debating whether to pass concealed carry laws, the question was not whether all crime rates would decrease uniformly and monotonically in every precinct of the state, but whether blood would run in the streets for 200 miles as deep as the horses’ bridles or only up to the stirrups, and now we can see that nothing like that happened. In the censorship wars in the old days the courts commonly said that people could publish all kinds of porn unless somebody could show that there was a “clear and present danger” that would justify infringing on our First Amendment rights. Data keeps accumulating to show that our Second Amendment rights do not create any “clear and present danger” and maybe eventually the pols will quit harassing us, but they sure have not stopped so far. Have a nice day 🙂