neutron619

Yes, and - although it might be difficult for you to acknowledge - I find it distasteful too. As an old-school liberal (i.e the real kind, not the modern, flaky "liberal demorcrat" kind), I wouldn't normally want to see anyone shut down, but there is a reason for it this time. (And before I go on, I'd like to point out my explicit comments indicating that I think BASC have some questions to answer and that Rewulf has asked some important questions. I might even agree with some of his points of view, as I indicated in the previous thread.) However, there comes a point (and this has been my point throughout my commentary here) where it's clear that there's nothing further to be gained from flogging the dead horse so to speak. In fact, my post to which you refer was not a tirade, and neither was it patronising in so far as it was necessary for someone to say those things, though I grant that it could have been taken so. To avoid any further confusion, let me explain the subtlety behind it that you and others have obviously missed, in the simplest possible terms: start another thread. I too want to hear what BASC have to say in answer to at least some of the questions asked. But it's obvious you aren't going to get any more answers here because you've made it impossible for Conor or anyone else to answer given your mode of attack, the subject of the thread and the way that you've simply dismissed any answers you don't like or diverted his responses with other questions to try and score points. So, in the interests of all of us hearing something more constructive, I ask you: Please write a bulleted list of the questions you want answered. Post them here in a new thread (try "Questions for BASC" instead of some "when did you last murder a puppy?"-type title) and give Conor or whoever at BASC a day or two to come back with answers to all of them. Then - and this is the important bit - take him at his word. You may not like what he says, but it may surprise you to know (or recall) that people aren't generally evil and that they usually do act for the right reasons and in theirs and others' best interests. Then, finally, leave it alone. Agree to disagree, or something. But above all, please try to demonstrate some awareness that people have to be made to feel that it's worth their time to engage with you and that you, as the petitioner, have a responsibility to be courteous and acknowledge others' best efforts, even if you personally don't feel they're adequate.

Oh come off it. Criticism is one thing and goodness knows I've exchanged some lengthy emails with Conor recently too, but this is the sort of thing I have to explain to my 9-year old: If you want people to engage with you, you have to make them feel that it's worth their while. I mean, Conor could sit here listening to and responding to your complaints in some kind of itemized fashion (and as far as I can see, he did attempt that - if not here then on the previous "bashing" thread) but as you say, he's got 150,000 other members he could be dealing with who won't aggressively pursue and berate him and for whom he could actually achieve something positive. You've already demonstrated that no amount of engagement is going to satisfy you (or shut you up) so he's probably (and speaking as a BASC member, correctly) decided that the money BASC members are paying for his time is being wasted, ergo you aren't going to get a response. Added to all that, you're rude, frankly, and displaying all the tactics of someone trying to win an argument rather than hold a representative to account - yet you justify all this in the name of the latter. Apart from attacking the man and not the ball, so to speak, we've all watched you use the "squirrel!" (n.b. see "Up") approach of bringing up other arguments and points as soon as a previous point is addressed as a means of avoiding having to acknowledge that it has indeed been addressed. We've just seen you - again - attack another poster who doesn't agree with you point of view, simply for saying so. You have consistently assumed the worst motivations on the part of BASC and anyone daring to speak up for them, but defended any of those who agree with you to the hilt. And finally, all of this has occurred within the bounds of a thread asking whether people trust BASC. If you were genuinely looking for engagement and answers you wouldn't do it inside a thread that is akin to asking Conor / BASC representatives "so when did you stop beating your wife?" As I said, it's the kind of thing I have to explain to my 9 year old. If you want people to take what you're saying seriously then say it in a grown-up, calm and measured fashion. Address your points one at a time and acknowledge the answers. Disagree politely. Whether you're right or wrong doesn't really matter until you've managed to persuade people you're worth listening to! As clever or right as you and your supporters may be (and note that I haven't said you are/aren't), your argumentative approach doesn't currently justify the attention. As for throwing toys out of the pram.... Well. As an aside, after Rewulf has had the opportunity to respond / call me names again, I'd like to see this thread closed down. It's run it's course. I think PW could do with an embargo on "bashing" threads for a while (or at least stipulate that we have to go after a different organization for a while). Does anyone trust the Welsh Guild of Table Leg Covermakers, for example?

As would I, but I suspect after 9 pages of unconstructive mud slinging, you're not going to get an answer. If, on the other hand you'd argued constructively, approached the debate with an open mind, willing to be changed, and not assumed that everything you personally disagree with is a sign of malicious intent on the part of the organisation....

Any day now, I'm going to start a thread on why BASC are **** because they didn't support our shooters during the American War of Independence and because they haven't yet managed to abolish disabled people, Morris dancing or Wednesdays. It would do about as much good as this thread. If you lot spent half of the time you spend moaning about BASC actually doing something to try to keep shooting going for the next generation, it would be in rude health. BASC aren't perfect - as someone observed above, they are people - but at least they're trying to achieve something, which is more than 95% of the keyboard warriors on this site. Christ - I remember the days when PW was actually worth visiting and had an active membership. Now it seems to be about 10 of you, constantly bitching about BASC - except when you're bitching about my posts and anything else you don't understand or agree with.

Consider that request seconded.

I just came across an article in the Mail which piqued my curiosity. See: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11776645/UKs-worst-air-pollution-hotspots-area-risk.html Apparently, the National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory have just published their data for 2022. This is mostly concerned with carbon dioxide, oxides of nitrogen and so on but I noticed that it also contained figures for lead, which led me to wonder how our exposure to lead game might compare to atmospheric exposure. Following through to this link, there is an interactive map which shows the recorded measurements of all the pollutants in graphical form: https://naei.beis.gov.uk/emissionsapp/ Looking at the map for lead, it's clear that there's a wide variation between cities and rural areas and that this correlates strongly with the routes major roadways - one of the conclusions the Mail reports is that even 20 years after the removal of lead in petrol, its still floating around all over the place and is being picked up but the NAEI's monitoring stations. I followed the link from the map through to the data sets, presented here: https://naei.beis.gov.uk/data/map-uk-das This image is presented, along with the various raw data: I have dug into the data a bit and run som queries against the interactive map. I found that my area seems to average around 20kg/km² of lead emitted every year and this is pretty normal for any location within a few miles of a main road or a town or city. That set me thinking - it's quite a small quantity of lead over a very large area, but how much is it to the average human being? On the basis that lead is a heavy element and will tend to "sink" if it's airborne, and, on the basis that nearly all of the measuring stations will be set at altitudes of 100m or less, I thought that I could approximate a concentration of airborne lead by dividing mass by volume and find out how much there is floating around per unit volume. The volume of air in 1km² to a height of 100m is 1000m * 1000m * 100m = 100,000,000m³ This means that to find the concentration, we do 20kg / 100,000,000m³ = 0.0000002kg/m³ = 0.0002g/m³ On the basis that a human being breathes approximately 11000 litres (11m³) of air per day, we can calculate a daily exposure of: 11m³ * 0.0002g/m³ = 0.0022g/day or: 0.0022g/day * 365.25 days = 0.80355g/year or: 0.80355g/year * 75 years = 60.266g of lead in an average lifetime, just by existing. Measured in units of English #6 (270 pellets/oz; pellet weight = 0.105g), that's equivalent to eating: 60.266g / 0.105g = c. 574 pellets of #6 shot Assuming that one tries to remove shot from birds and that there is a 50% chance of a single pellet being left in a piece of meat and eaten, this is equivalent exposure to eating game once every 3 weeks for the entirety of the aforementioned 75 year life span. Now here's where it gets interesting: There are parts of the country, mostly around major cities and motorways where the average emissions of lead are measured in the hundreds of kilograms. Parts of London and Birmingham have area emissions averages of up to 500kg per km³ and individual measurements (for a single km³) of three times that. Maintaining all of the assumptions above, if one lived in one of those areas, here are the numbers: Concentration: 500kg / 100,000,000m³ = 0.000005kg/m³ = 0.005g/m³ Daily Exposure: 11m³ * 0.005g/m³ = 0.055g/day Yearly Exposure: 0.005g/m³ * 365.25 = 20.089g/year Lifetime Exposure: 20.089g * 75 years = 1.507kg of lead in an average lifetime, just by existing. #6 Shot Equivalent: c. 14,349 pellets Or (with a 50% chance of finding a pellet): equivalent exposure to eating game once every 2 days for the entirety of the aforementioned 75 year life span. Afterthoughts Of course, not all the lead that goes in, stays in. Most 75-year-old Londoners don't have over a kilogram of lead accumulated in their bones / kidneys / brain and unlike mercury (for example) the body can clear lead, albeit slowly. The main take-away point however, is that even if you live in a nice clean part of the country with plenty of fresh, unpolluted air, you're still going to have to work very hard at eating lead-shot game to be able to match the lifetime exposure of someone living and working in a city who never touches a single pheasant breast or venison loin. Furthermore, since we aren't seeing huge numbers of lead poisoning cases amongst Londoners and Brummies, we can reasonably conclude that even that level of exposure is tolerable, if not ideal. That being so, exposure to shot for humans is a non-issue. Birdlife must be significantly more sensitive to lead than humans if there are genuine "epidemiological" effects.

Well, thank you - I'm glad they were interesting, although I have to admit, I'm now wondering whether you and BASC ought to have been aware of the historical context before now? More generally, folk with an axe to grind will grind their axes; anyone concerned with population-level health and economic effects might (and clearly do) feel that lead toxicity is an issue of significance - a few QUALYs lost across a population of 70 million is a measurable (but small) effect that might reduce economic output somewhat. But to the individual, the loss, assuming one isn't shovelling handfuls of #6 down with a tablespoon, will be so insignificant as to be unnoticeable. On the basis that gamebirds can't vote, it ought to be possible to make this argument to someone in Westminster?

See my earlier musings on the precautionary principle and, to answer your specific question, "because it is possible to do so" (and I don't just mean that from a cynical perspective). If: the year is 1800 child mortality is 25% the average adult within reach of lead-shot birds is a wealthy landowner who keeps / hunts game on his land who is poorly educated by modern standards, but can afford the attention of doctors, but will still die, on average, before the age of 40 of what we now consider common, treatable infections, and comes into contact on a regular basis with far more dangerous toxins then the relative harm of eating lead-shot game, which might be as much as a couple of points off IQ over a lifetime of doing so regularly, and a small amount of organ damage from accumulation (it mostly goes to, and stays in bones, where the body keeps it out of the way), and the loss of a few days or weeks of life which might otherwise have been enjoyed is totally insignificant compared to the risks of encountering dangerous diseases like measels, typhus, typhoid, cholera or the kinds of chemicals which were used in products designed to enhance people's lives at the time, for example: residual methanol in alcoholic beverages white lead (i.e. lead carbonate) in paint, beauty products and toothpastes mercury (in leather products and many "remedies" for medical conditions) sulphur, cadmium and other unpleasant toxins contained within house coal and more besides. Returning to the theme of moral argument, it's impossible to argue in the year 1800 that one should ban lead on health grounds since there are so many other more dangerous forms of exposure prevalent in the general population - any doctor proposing to ban what was then thought to be a harmless, inert metal (elemental lead, that is, not the salts of lead) would have been laughed out of town. Fast forward 200 years and most, if not all of those problems have been solved. Lead is no more poisonous than it was and the human body no more likely to absorb or suffer it than in years past - in fact, generally, exposure is far lower, even if one eats game. But because the other larger sources of risk have essentially been eliminated, by food standards, antibiotics and stricter chemical controls, lead's risk is now perceived to be far more serious than it was previously. Again, there's been no absolute change in any of it and in fact, probably a significant reduction in overall risk because of the removal of other sources of lead exposure (e.g. areosols from combustion of old petrol). It's just that everything else is dealt with, and motivated politicians and anti-shooting organizations can make a case more easily because the numbers now look a lot scarier compared to other, even smaller risks. For a corollory, consider deaths from cancer: it used to be the case that hardly anyone died of cancer (although almost everyone diagnosed did, at one time). But that was only because environmental toxicity, infection, heart disease and stroke killed most people before cancer could develop. Cancer is now a major killer because we're much better at treating those other problems with long-term medication and management - so life expectancy goes up and people live long enough to get cancer and die from that instead. It wasn't that cancer wouldn't have happened and wouldn't have killed people in 1800 - if they'd all lived to 70+, it would have been as common, or moreso than it is today - but they didn't, so back then, it was a rare illness. In short, it all depends on how you look at things - but the precautionary principle is the problem because it forces those in power to look at risk (and only risk) without considering absolute harm, harm done in historical terms, or indeed, whether society considers the harm to be acceptable. It also does so from a population perspective, which essentially forbids the informed individual from accepting a greater risk than his peers, because the balance of risk and reward is different for him / her.

You have a PM.

Very tempted by this - if only there was somewhere local I could buy cartridges for it! Good luck with the sale. 👍

There are so many problems with the arguments on both sides of this debate that I both despair and hardly know where to begin. On the one hand, the paper referenced above saying that the incidence of lead shot ingestion in dead birds had increased doesn't actually state that lead killed them - just that they found it inside the birds they tested. It doesn't mean the birds suffered from or died of lead poisoning. It's no more conclusive than noting that a good proportion of elderly people die with but not from various kinds of relatively benign cancers (i.e. prostate cancer). If such cancers were caused by household cleaning products, would we be looking to ban bleach, even though no real harm occurs? This conflation of "birds contain lead" with "birds are suffering from lead poisoning and dying because of it" is neither scientific, nor helpful, but BASC seem to be fully on board with it all the same. But that's just one of the huge number of problems with the idea that banning lead will solve anything. Not the least of which is that we've been blasting lead pellets all over the place for coming up to 500 years - the damage is done. Even a total ban right now is not going to halt whatever effects lead has on birdlife, because it's there already. As an ex-chemist, it frustrates me enormously that we seem to get worked up about (generally inert) lead metal and treat it the same as (genuinely dangerous) salts of lead (e.g. lead oxide, lead chloride) which are actually responsible for most of the lead poisoning cases that occur. Metallic lead in the form of shot doesn't react with stuff - so the body can't pick it up. The salts do, hence the body absorbing them and the damage occurring. Does anyone in BASC or the GWCT understand this point? Perhaps the acidic conditions of birds' gizzards create the salts - but I'd be surprised if it was significant. And so on... On the other hand, as someone who's made the effort to move over to shooting steel and bought / disposed of guns to do so, I am putting my money where my mouth is - we are not going to win this argument. The reason is simple: whatever the real consequences of lead going into the environment might be (and I'm sure that no-one actually knows), we are suffering like many marginalized groups - smokers, drinkers, the obese, people who want to mind their own business, and so on - from the institutional adoption of the precautionary principle. I've been thinking about this this week, mostly in relation to the ULEZ being introduced in London, but it applies here too. Please bear with me whilst I lay it out in simple terms. The mayor's argument is that, because of the precautionary principle, a risk of harm - i.e. lung disease resulting from vehicle emissions in the capital - should be eliminated because there is a mechanism by which it can be. Of course, this relies on scientific evidence or modelling, but note the important point - it's a moral argument masquerading as expert opinon. I'll come back to that, but first let me illustrate the point another way. Suppose one was a member of a group which wanted to raise (drivers association) or lower (car accident victims charity) the speed limit. If you were advocating for a higher speed limit, you might make a technical argument. You could say that cars have got lighter since the limit was introduced; more safety features are now standard in vehicles; brakes are better and so on. It might even be possible to argue that in terms of miles travelled per accident, people are better drivers than they were. There are many technical reasons to support that change. You could also, of course, argue for shorter journey times and greater convenience. Likewise, you could advocate for a lower speed limit. You could argue that because there are more journeys, the overall number of accidents is higher and more people are getting hurt, so one must compensate by making vehicles move more slowly. In extremis you could argue for a 3mph limit, or a total ban on automobiles - no-one will die in car crashes if no-one drives cars. You could say that cars aren't getting lighter, due to batteries being significantly heavy and are therefore are harder to stop in an emergency. There is a good argument for the avoidance of lithium (i.e. battery) fires which are hard to extinguish. In short, there are many technical reasons to support that view. However, the real reason that the speed limit is 70mph on the motorway is because that is broadly where society's opinion on the balance between the convenience of reaching one's destination in a timely fashion and the avoidance of road deaths and injuries lies. It is not something that you can support or refute with technical arguments - it's just a collective feeling that we're prepared to accept this number of dead and maimed users of cars each year in exchange for the convenience of not having to walk, ride a horse or rely on some other form of transport. If that's the reason, then only argument one can make to achieve real change is a moral one. One has to persuade society at large that it's worth accepting either a higher number of casualties for the convenience of getting to where we're going faster (e.g. some European countries and US states) or conversely that the number of casualties is too high and that increased inconvenience and longer journey times are a price worth paying to save lives (e.g. New Zealand). Returning to the ULEZ and to lead shot: The reason that those protesting about the introduction of the ULEZ have a chance of getting it overturned is that societal opinion currently doesn't value the supposed health benefits as much as they value the freedom to drive and the avoidance of significant extra inconvenience and taxation. The technical argument about saving 4000 lives may be true, but let's be honest - most of us don't give a **** about that if we're one of the 10 million people that are going to have to pay to visit the city. They have a moral argument that the mayor's position is totally unrepresentative of the position society currently takes on the balance between convenience of travel and the cost of emissions. They might win on that basis. Unfortunately, however, we will lose, for the same reason. "Society" does not care about the ballistic superiority of lead, or technical arguments to do with the shotguns or rifles shooting it. But it does care about food safety and "environmental" (I use the word with some caution) issues, and although the evidence remains thin, its current position is that "lead is bad" and that "birds are cute". We (the shooting community) are outliers in this respect, because our moral position (that the risk of birds dying from lead poisoning is sufficiently low that we can tolerate it for the improved likelihood of clean kills in the field) is far removed from the majority. Since we have no persuasive moral argument to oppose the eventual restrictions and since we spend our time arguing (evidently) the technical points, rather than opposing the precautionary principle upon which the restrictions proposed are based, we will lose. The only way to change that is to identify (in every area of public policy) and oppose the principle itself: to say that we do not accept the premise that risks must always be reduced or eliminated; to remember that risk is often what makes life fulfilling and worthwhile. Unfortunately for lead shot, it's too late. BASC are only being pragmatic when they recognize that fact.

Sorry, but whether it's real ignorance or simply confected, what exactly is it that the supposed "experts" round here have against actually working stuff out, understanding deeply and taking the time to work through a proof or an argument and discover the details? Of course we all know that Wymberley's mate isn't going to notice the difference of 0.0076 seconds in shot arrival times, but don't any of you have any intellectual curiosity about what we do? Are you really so arrogant as to think that because you personally don't care or understand that it isn't worth understanding? The way most of you go on, it's a bit like claiming to be a world class racing driver but having no idea what kind of fuel to put in your car. What harm does it do that those of us who are interested enough to take the time to work stuff out, because it's interesting to us, talk about it here? Why ridicule? Why not live and let live, or indeed, follow the old advice that if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all?

I don't mean to be impertinent, but did you order all posts by date ascending and then start at the top or something?

Talk about raising the dead...

I take it your man deals with all the details then and you simply point the thing?