I appreciated your article on the current ammunition problem (“Out of ammo,” June 25). I have a few concerns from my personal experience.
On the non-lead ruling, you pointed out a provision that California is obligated to provide cost-moderated alternatives to lead ammunition. I have been shopping for non-lead ammunition for more than a year now, and I have not seen any that is equivalent in price to lead. Furthermore, some lead ammunition is actually quite inexpensive, and no non-lead ammo has come close to those prices. Moreover, much of the more affordable sporting ammunition is simply not produced in non-lead. The best example of this is .22 long rifle ammunition, which is probably the most popular and least expensive sporting round in the world. It has not yet been manufactured in non-lead at all. Winchester has been promising a tin round for many months (reporting a July 2009 release), which is considerably more expensive than popular lead ammunition.
Complicating this is California’s limited selection of approved non-lead ammunition. Many brands of non-lead ammunition are not allowed because California has simply not approved them. One of the best examples of this is steel shot in shotgun shells. It is not approved by California for condor preservation, but it has been required for waterfowl for decades to avoid lead pollution of wetlands. Steel shot can be purchased at any Wal-Mart for about $5 per box of 25 rounds, but technically a person would be in violation for shooting sewer rats with it. However, California did approve non-lead buckshot from the “Stars and Stripes Ammunition” company, priced at more than $100 per box of 20!
Non-lead ammunition has great limitations as well. Solid copper or gilding metal rounds tend to only mushroom at the tip and travel right through local animals. They behave more like the full metal jacket ammunition used for military purposes and outlawed for hunting due to a tendency to only cripple animals. Fragmenting rounds tend to cause more internal damage and a cleaner kill with animals traveling less or not at all. While some argue that these are bad for damage to meat, they are also advantageous for quicker death, resulting in fewer lost animals and accidents. Keep in mind that there are a great many areas of hunting where the animal is not killed for meat at all (such as a farmer legally protecting his crops from feral hogs, which also requires non-lead now). The good news is that there are projectiles that have been manufactured in non-lead for many years for military and other purposes that fragment just for this purpose. These are termed “frangible” and are frowned upon by California, but this definition and restriction appear nowhere in state law.
On condor preservation, the Ridley-Tree non-lead zone encompasses hundreds of thousands of acres of non-condor habitat. The entirety of Carrizo Plains is within this zone, which may well be the poorest example of condor habitat in the state. So are cities and small towns that often have adjacent rural areas allowing shooting, like riverbeds—typically unsuitable to condors. So are beaches with adjacent agricultural areas, such as Guadalupe. The logic is poor. It’s like saying that because mountain lions inhabit this part of California, you should be watchful for them at the mall. Now there is discussion of the ban going statewide.
Some people argue that this isn’t a big deal because one box of ammunition should last a deer hunter all season. They do not consider that deer hunting is not the majority of shooting activity. They fail to consider the farmer protecting his crops, the varminter (shooting hundreds of destructive, over-populated, non-game animals every year), or any other sportsman who is affected by the escalation in prices and availability problems. Competition shooters may fire 1,000 rounds in a weekend at sporting events. This forces more reloading and alternative means through smaller enterprises trying to augment supply with cheaper products. This, in turn, increases the probability for error, reduces safety margins, and risks the sportsman while not making the public or the condor any safer at all.
The one saving grace in the ammunition dilemma of the past year has been the availability of ammunition on the Internet. Santa Maria, with a population of approximately 100,000, has Big 5, Wal-Mart, and one tiny gun store to sell ammunition. Kmart was already pretty much forced out of the ammo business by Michael Moore, as seen on his farcical documentary Bowling for Columbine. These dealers typically carry only a basic inventory—nothing for reloading or custom calibers. Recent demand leaves their shelves bare daily. Great variety can be found on the Internet with better prices and better systems for backorder, automatic notifications, and customer service. Now AB 962 threatens to curtail this option, outlawing Internet purchasing. It would also make reloading for friends and family illegal without a federal license.
Keep in mind that many billions of non-compliant lead rounds sit dusty in the garages of shooters while they spend billions to buy the new compliant stuff. There is also talk of laws requiring new micro-stamped ammunition using an identifying technology, which would require all ammunition owners and producers to scrap all they now hold. Billions of dollars have been spent to comply with the lead laws and rising prices, and laws like this would ask us to now throw that out and spend billions more to upgrade to a new technology that is yet unproven. Why would a criminal pay more for the new trackable stuff with all the old stuff out there for grabs?
Guys like me fear that a game warden will take my grandfather’s rifle because I mistakenly did something wrong, so we spend money to be sure we do it right. These laws inspired by different governmental concerns converge on guys like me from so many angles that we are being choked. We’re willing to try to do things right because we love our country and our heritage and because we are unwilling to live criminal lives. Murderers, armed robbers, and poachers have already chosen that life, so they have nothing to lose.
Law-abiding shooters fear these laws. Criminals don’t. Lawmakers keep missing the target.
Ed Apalategui is a Santa Maria resident. Send comments to rmiller@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 23-30, 2009.