NEWTOWN, Conn.–In response to an announcement today regarding a National Parks Service program encouraging hunters to voluntarily switch to alternative ammunition, the National Shooting Sports Foundation rejected NPS’s categorization of traditional ammunition as a health threat. NSSF is offering to work with the National Park Service to develop measures to educate hunters about steps they can take to prevent scavengers from ingesting lead fragments of spent traditional ammunition. The park service is proposing to ban, at a minimum, the use of lead bullets, shot and sinkers in the park system by NPS personnel.

While no scientific evidence supports restricting the use of traditional ammunition containing lead components, the firearms industry believes that establishing voluntary measures is a more reasoned step than banning traditional ammunition, a drastic policy decision unsupported by science. NPS has raised concerns that lead bullet fragments found in game meat could cause lead poisoning in humans, a charge not borne out in scientific studies, including a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.

“While we’re not opposed to voluntary measures, we maintain there is no need for them,” said Steve Sanetti, president of NSSF, the trade association for the firearms and ammunition industry. “The firearms industry supports science-based decisions about wildlife management. Under current regulations, there is no scientific evidence showing that the health of wildlife populations and humans is at risk from the use of traditional ammunition.”

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NEWTOWN, Conn. — The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) – the trade association for the firearms, ammunition, hunting and shooting sports industry – is applauding the decision by the North Dakota Community Action Partnership to resume accepting at food banks across the state donations of venison harvested by hunters using traditional ammunition.

“We applaud The North Dakota Community Action Partnership’s common sense decision, founded on sound science, to allow hunter’s to donate venison to the needy,” said NSSF Senior Vice President and General Counsel Lawrence G. Keane.

The North Dakota Community Action Partnership administers the Sportsmen Against Hunger Program in North Dakota. Last year, following a scientifically unfounded claim by a local dermatologist, William Cornatzer, that consuming venison harvested with traditional ammunition posed a human health risk, the North Dakota Community Action Partnership was required by the state’s Department of Health to destroy donated venison and instituted its own policy not to accept donated venison if the hunter harvested the deer using traditional ammunition. They continued to accept venison taken by bow.

The state’s policy was strongly criticized by NSSF as an over reaction that literally took natural, low fat, high protein food out of the mouths of the less fortunate because there was no scientific evidence of a human health risk. Subsequent, unbiased research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed the absence of a human health risk and demonstrated that North Dakota hunters that consumed game harvested with traditional ammunition did not suffer any adverse human health risks. North Dakota officials failed to conduct their own study, but merely accepted the samples from the dermatologist.

“This unfortunate scare was caused by Dr. Cornatzer who sits on the board member of an organization, the Peregrine Fund, which advocates for a total ban on the use of traditional ammunition for hunting. Dr. Cornatzer’s junk science was thoroughly debunked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),” said Keane.

The CDC study found that:

• The average lead level of the hunters tested was actually lower than the blood lead level of the average American, including non-hunters. In other words, if you were to randomly pick someone on the street, chances are they would have a higher blood lead level than the hunters in this study. No adult in the study had a blood lead level that came even close to rising to the level where the CDC would begin to be concerned.

• The lead levels of children under 6 in the study had a blood lead level of less than half the national average. Children over 6 had even lower lead levels. The CDC’s level of concern for lead in children is 10 — more than 10 times the amount (a mean of just 0.88) found in the study population.

• While there was only a very small difference between participants who ate wild game harvested with traditional ammunition and non-hunters — only .3 micrograms — the hunters in the study were well below the CDC level of concern for adults, which is 25. They were even below the level of concern for children. Furthermore, there was no correlation between blood lead levels and those adults that consumed game for the longest period of time which you would expect to see if consuming game harvested with traditional ammunition caused elevated lead levels.

“We hope that any lingering concerns hunters and their families may still have about consuming game taken with traditional ammunition will now be put to rest based on sound science and the common sense that comes from centuries of hunters using traditional ammunition,” concluded Keane.

Hunters are reminded to properly field dress and butcher game.

NRA Members Must Oppose Sotomayor
by Sandy Froman

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama’s first nominee to the
U.S. Supreme Court, has a narrow view of the Second Amendment that
contradicts the Court’s landmark decision in District of Columbia v.
Heller. A heated debate has started in the U.S. Senate over her
opposition to the right to keep and bear arms. This issue, which has
decided the fate of presidential elections, could also decide her
nomination. Gun owners, and especially the members of the National Rifle
Association, must aggressively oppose Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation to
the Supreme Court.

On June 24, senators began speaking on the floor of the Senate
expressing grave concerns over Judge Sotomayor’s Second Amendment
record. Senator Jeff Sessions R-AL, the Ranking Member of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, pointed out that although her record on the issue
is “fairly scant,” she has twice stated that the Second
Amendment is not
a fundamental right. Senator Sessions also noted that in Second
Amendment and other constitutional cases, Sotomayor’s analysis of
important constitutional issues has been lacking suggesting “a troubling
tendency to avoid or casually dismiss difficult Constitutional issues of
exceptional importance.” Sotomayor’s view on the Second Amendment
clearly reflects an extreme anti-gun philosophy, and some Democrat
senators from pro-gun states are justifiably nervous.

Last year, the Supreme Court held in Heller that the Second Amendment
guarantees the right of individual Americans to keep and bear firearms.
But that ruling was a fiercely-contested, 5-4 split decision. Justice
Kennedy joined the four conservatives on the Court to make the majority,
with the four liberal justices writing passionate dissents about how the
Second Amendment does not apply to private citizens.

Bluntly speaking, the Second Amendment survived by a single vote. Had
one justice voted differently, the Second Amendment would have been
erased from the Bill of Rights forever. Today in the Supreme Court, the
right to bear arms hangs by a single vote.

The next question the Supreme Court will decide is whether the Second
Amendment is a “fundamental right” that applies to cities and
states,
thus preventing them from restricting gun rights. Even the liberal
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held earlier this year in Nordyke v. King
that the Second Amendment is a fundamental right, yet Judge Sotomayor
disagrees.

When Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, it
belied his flowery rhetoric about respecting our constitutional gun
rights. Out of almost 200 federal appeals judges in this country, Judge
Sotomayor is one of only six to weigh in (after the Heller case) to hold
that the Second Amendment only limits federal actions. If your state or
city chooses to ban all guns or take away the ones that you already have
in your home for hunting and self-defense, Sonia Sotomayor says the
Constitution can’t help you.

This position becomes all the more radical when it’s revealed how she
reached this conclusion. Only six judges have denied gun rights against
the states. Of these, three did so in a recent Seventh Circuit case, NRA
v. Chicago, writing a detailed opinion that the Second Amendment doesn’t
apply to the states because they thought an old 1800s Supreme Court case
tied their hands on the issue, and they commended the case up to the
Supreme Court after long and scholarly consideration. Judge Sotomayor
and two of her liberal colleagues, however, wrote only a single
paragraph on the whole issue when deciding their own New York case,
Maloney v. Cuomo. In one paragraph, she said the Second Amendment gives
people no rights at all when it comes to state or city laws. She gave no
explanation, and made no call for Supreme Court action.

Then we find that this has been a consistent belief for Sotomayor. In a
case before her in 2004, she and her colleagues concluded that there is
no fundamental right in the Second Amendment but provided no substantive
analysis to justify this conclusion. Throughout her career, Judge
Sotomayor’s record is one of consistent opposition to the private
ownership of firearms.

America has almost 90 million gun owners who value their rights. And of
these, no one does more to protect the Second Amendment than the four
million members of the National Rifle Association.

I served as an officer of the NRA for nine years, including a two-year
term as president. I saw NRA members turn the tide on Election Day 2000
to defeat Al Gore. We fought again to help defeat John Kerry in 2004. We
can do the same with Sonia Sotomayor, if we call our U.S. Senators and
tell them to vote against this anti-gun judge. No fewer than fourteen
Democrat senators have solid records on the Second Amendment, and we
must urge them to oppose this nominee.

Next year, the Supreme Court is likely to take up NRA v. Chicago, which
will decide whether the Second Amendment applies to states and cities
like it does the federal government. This case is as important as
Heller, and will massively impact gun rights forever.

We already know where Judge Sotomayor stands. It’s time to tell the
Senate, “Vote No! on Sonia Sotomayor.”

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