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VPC - Poisonous Pastime - Section One <br />Page 1 of 16 <br />Violence Po icy Center <br />index <br />Firearm Laws <br />Poisonous Pastime <br />email Action <br />Horn <br />About VPC <br />The Health Risks of Shooting Ranges and Lead to Children, Families, and the <br />Environment <br />Section One: Lead, Environmental Pollution, and Health Hazards <br />"Until fairly recent years, most shooters wore no hearing protection. As a result, most <br />shooters over 40 have some hearing loss. For many, it is a very significant and noticeable <br />hearing loss. Most of us didn't know how much damage we were incrementally inflicting on <br />ourselves. There was little or no warning about the danger to our health years ago. The same <br />is true with the lead problem. We fired round after round, match after match, without <br />realizing what lead could do to us." <br />—Joseph P. Tartaro, Second Amendment Foundation news release, January 10, <br />1998 <br />Shooting ranges are of two basic types. Indoor ranges are usually restricted to the use of handguns <br />or lower caliber rifles —such as the .22s used by many school rifle teams —shooting at relatively <br />short range. Outdoor ranges allow use of a wider variety of long guns: shotguns for skeet, trap, and <br />"sporting clays,ie and higher -powered rifles for target shooting at longer ranges. <br />Both types of ranges share a common problem —lead. Most ammunition used at ranges is made of <br />lead. Although no records on ammunition production are kept in the United States, it has been <br />estimated that between 400 and 600 tons of lead are used each day to make bullets and "a high <br />proportion of it is left to clutter up shooting ranges."4 It is no wonder, then, that numerous <br />studies —since at least the 1970s—have documented that outdoor shooting ranges are major <br />sources of lead pollution in the environment, and that indoor shooting ranges are significant sources <br />of lead poisoning among people who use them! <br />The danger of lead poisoning extends not only to those who shoot in indoor firing ranges. It also <br />reaches the shooters' families (especially children), and third parties, such as construction workers <br />whose jobs bring them into contact with shooting ranges, and persons who share the building, such <br />as children in a school in which a range is located. <br />http://www.vpc.org/studies/leadone.htm 2/5/2014 '/ <br />