Shooting firearms is messy and dirty. You get all kinds of oils, fouling, lead, particulates on your upper body and hands. If there's no room at the range, I go home, clean my guns up depending on how much shooting was done, then wipe up and shower. My hands are visibly soiled after shooting a few dozen rounds.
The fuck are you shooting, that you're hands are soiled after a few dozen rounds?
I can shoot for hours and not have anything on my hands.
Sounds like you're shooting muzzle loaded pistols or some really shit ammo.
Lead and fouling come out of the chamber when a round is extracted, you're breathing that in. Fouling has lead in it that gets over the internals of a firearm and the magazine. You're touching that. Lead is essentially vaporized out of the muzzle of the weapon, you breathe that in. There's lead on the casing, other particulars of rounds. When you clean that, unless you're wearing gloves you're exposing yourself to it. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not happening.
Can't speak for them, but my hands are usually pretty dirty after shooting a few mags due to reloading. Handling 7.62x39 surplus or 22lr is nasty work. Even cheaper 5.56 seems to be pretty gross. Was out just the other day and my hands were black from a box of Remington golden bullet.
this article and the research paper is bullshit. at least with my limited access to the details of the paper because of academic greed.
they didn't even show the levels of lead found in the blood of the subjects yet they call out acceptable levels in their introduction.
they also failed to accommodate for potential false positives by not including subjects that actively hunt and eat their game. that too can account for increased blood lead levels.
yes, out of caution, wash your hands after handling ammunition. or better yet, wear gloves so the oils in your skin don't degrade ammunition while in storage.
but, in no way does this study point to an increased risk of lead based illnesses.
Showing lead levels are higher in shooters didn't seem to be the point from how I read it. It stated that lead is dangerous and that around half of the people polled report not performing any kind of post-shooting hygiene.
"...post-shooting hygiene behaviors are uncommon and may represent a substantial pathway for residential lead exposure."
The implications seems to just be that poor shooting related hygiene could be a way people are getting exposed to lead. As in it might be something worth investigating.
Only 65 people out of 1630 people who shot in the past year reported not using lead ammunition? As someone who grew up hunting waterfowl, where using lead is illegal in the entire US, my mind is blown.
Non-hunter who enjoys shooting as a sport: it's rare that I encounter non-lead ammo.
It seems that hunting has way more restrictions but I've never been to a range where most/all of the ammo sitting around wasn't lead.
Huh. What do they make bullets out of in the US then? I always assumed lead by never got into firearms enough to learn
They make bullets out of pure Righteousness and The American Way (yeehaw.)
Lead poisoning would explain a lot about that country.
That checks…
Explains a lot
Hygiene? Sounds like woke sissy nonsense.
Don't worry. They'll take the woke sissy hygiene to the gun range and shoot it.
Maybe I missed it, but what about environmental lead poisoning? All those slugs in the ground can’t be good
I am almost 40, I've been around guns since I was maybe 7 and I have never been warned about this before. I also have a PhD and am happy to make you feel stupid if that's your jam, but it seems like something we should be taught but aren't?
Of course we clean ourselves and our guns but I would never have said "hey hold on, I need to use an extra product before I eat my turkey sandwich". I don't prefer to smell like gunpowder, but I don't like smelling like a cow either and the cleanup was similar.
I’ve been around guns since I was maybe 7
The real WTF.
If I were to guess why it's not a thing that's readily taught I would assume it's because of the rather shockingly large lead lobby that exists in the USA pushing against education and regulation against lead. There's a meaningful establishment bent on making sure we don't ask about it or learn about it.
Honestly, it would be easier to just ban lead based ammo then trying to enforce this
They aren't washing in general.
I want to disagree with you, but like one time I was working in a kitchen. I had a little sniffle so I wore a mask and was washing my hands up to the elbows every half hour. The other folk on the crew thought I was weird for wearing a mask and actually insane for washing my hands. Not for washing my hands so often, just for washing my hands.
Some people are gross
Ah, the Roman Empire speedrun.
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind