Pretty sure it's much more prevalent than would be tied specifically to gun use as a catalyst, though...
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It's a known risk, and there are guidelines to lessen or prevent lead exposure at the range, but I'd wager most shooters aren't aware.
For example:
Use jacketed or lead free bullets and primers.
Wash your face, arms and hands after using the range.
Change your clothes and shoes after using the range.
Wash your range clothes separately from your families.
Do not eat, drink, or smoke on the range.
Take the same precautions after cleaning your guns.
That being said, the folks at largest risk for this kind of exposure would be those who fire guns the most often, so that population would be the canary in the coal mine so to speak.
https://www.quora.com/How-often-do-police-officers-practice-at-ranges
"How often do police officers practice at ranges?
Most departments require re-qualification training once a year.
My department required shooting three times a year, once with our sidearm, once with our 12 gauge shotguns, and once with our AR 15 carbines.
As for my self, I go to the range 8 to 10 times a year. I am usually accompanied by 5 or 6 of my fellow officers. We are not for the fun, we are training by using the state required shooting plans and we add a little extra to it.
Most officers I know only go to range when required for re-qualification. Not because they don’t want to, shooting off a couple hundreds rounds is an expensive proposition."
Yeah... Might be a reason cops seem dumber than average, and they don't hire the brightest to begin with.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
Thanks for being the first person in this thread to actually post some useful tips to get the lead out, so to speak.
lead pipes, leaded gasoline, lead paint, lead sweetener …
We're leaders! /s
You’d have to shoot thousands of rounds in an unventilated room to get even close to one day of leaded gasoline exposure
Is it possible? Yes
Could it at least in part explain some behaviour? Yes.
But the missing question really is how much, and the answer is probably infitessimally small even if Real.
For lead exposure there are far easier and more common ways to get exposed such as lead pipes (which the US has a lot of).
But also you'd have to establish that the underlying problem is brain damage, and that is probably not true and instead reflects cultural bias.
There are many other reasons to explain American culture and behaviour which does not default to brain damage (or at least provable brain damage).
I would look at social and cultural issues first: an extremely weak political system, a poor quality general education system, high levels of religion, poor quality general health care, high levels of inequality including shocking levels of poverty.
The problem with the US is the extremes - if you have money you have the best the world can offer; if you don't then the state provision is shockingly poor. But alot of the crazies are also rich, and that comes down to the culture and society.
Lead poisoning is the least likely explanation, and is almost wishful thinking to try and explain things as a disease rather than normal human nature.
COVID causes brain damage too. We largely don't mask anymore like even in doctor's offices, or worse hospitals. I think COVID has done a large amount of damage in a short time.
I've been thinking long covid might also be a factor for it getting worse over the last few years.
This is a fascinating angle, I just looked at a couple of pubmed articles as a result of your comment and this one stuck out right away
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38829253/
“Long-COVID is characterized by persistent symptoms following COVID-19 infection, with cognitive impairment being a prominent feature. Symptoms include brain fog, difficulties with concentration, memory issues, and executive function deficits.”
At the end of the day hardly anything has just one cause, and you may be correct that long COVID has had a big impact on the critical thinking problem in America.
Great comment, receiving contributions like this is why I posted the question in the first place, thank you
haven't shot a gun in at least 20 years and I'm retarded as shit. so....
The damage has been done, probably 😂
I'm sure this will get rained with downvotes at some point but just know you gave me a good chuckle man, and I greatly needed it. Have a great night!
I only downvoted you for saying you'll be downvoted. Didn't want to disappoint you.
Probably not.
The brain follows the same patterns as muscles: use it or lose it. The general population in America is very much not educated at all. So their brains lose the ability to think rapidly.
very much not
Ew. 😅
The cognitive decline among older populations (50+) is absolutely appalling. It’s safe to say that the average 5th grader has better critical thinking skills than the average septuagenarian.
So… why the latter can vote but not the former is a mystery to me.
Smartphones (and the Internet more generally) have led to a major decline in reading books among the American public. I think this plays such a huge role in the absolutely batshit crazy cultural shift we've seen.
I figured copper jackets would greatly reduce lead exposure, which is all I used when I used to shoot.
This seems like reaching for the most esoteric and niche explanation to a fairly simple phenomenon.
America's school system sucks, and the anti-authoritarian nature of a culture formed by rejecting monarchy has been coopted to convince people that science and reason are authority figures you ought to fight back against.
The vast majority of Americans aren't gun owners, and the vast majority of gun owners don't shoot very often. You haven't provided evidence for Americans being incapable of critical thinking, but you want evidence for why guns aren't the source of american stupidity.
This is a very silly post. 😅
Well, I’m sure the exposure from going to the shooting range is a lot smaller than this, but lead poisoning from leaded gasoline apparently had a measurable impact on IQ levels.
I 100 percent agree that the big problem of the educational system, though! It is also interesting how self-fulfilling the adversity to government has been: it has made it so easy for men with bad intentions to tear down an at least functional democracy by promising to “fix” it.
That makes complete sense to me, that's a widespread systemic exposure; I'd kinda expect usage of leaded gasoline that to have that sort of impact
And yep, it sure is frustrating 🙃
Bro started off talking about how Americans are incapable of critical thinking and proceded to write the rest of the post.
I’m not sure why you think it’s esoteric or niche, there are something like 400 million guns in the US, with 1/3 of Americans directly owning at least one gun and 44% of us households having a gun owner. I think that’s pretty far from “the vast majority” not being gun owners https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own-guns.aspx
Moreover, lead exposure is known to cause cognitive impairments. I do agree however that most gun owners don’t shoot very often.
But if you need me to cite evidence that millions of Americans seem incapable of critical thinking you are either trolling or just not paying attention.
Here’s an entire book on the subject in case that helps https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Critical-Thinking-Crisis-Education/dp/1735942200
Finally, I’m not sure how you could construe my question as wanting evidence that it isn’t guns causing the problem, I pretty clearly asked a question, provided some links to explain what I had read that led me to that question, and then welcomed contrary evidence, of which you cited none by the way.
A sample size of 1000 people isnt exactly huge to be fair.
I'd like to clarify- I wasn't intending to be hostile, though I can see how it came across that way, and I apologize, I did a kind of shitty job of conveying my idea in a way that would connect with you. I think in online spaces it can be really hard to break the habit of making your point in a way that will register with bystanders rather than the person you're ostensibly actually talking to. I did a great job at expressing my perspective in a way that would validate the confusion I think amercians are likely to experience reading this post (as reflected by the votes), but I did a kinda crap job of actually addressing you, sorry about that. I'll do my best to be a little effective in communicating what I meant and why I felt that way.
As an American, this feels like a cartoonishly out of touch representation of the issues my country faces (which to be fair, would be entirely understandable if you don't live here and don't have any first-hand experience with the US). We have plenty of them (issues, that is), and there's lots of discussion to be had on the impact of guns on society, and also from where I'm standing it seems like are far more probable explanations for people lacking critical thinking skills than that we all just shoot our rootin' tootin' guns all the time over here in yeehaw land, and so we all have lead poisoning from all the bullets we're shooting'. (Not trying to build a straw man of things you didn't say, my point is that it feels like an caricature, and not one that aligns with the experience I have actually living here)
To reach past "crappy educational system", "weaponized anti-authoritarianism and individualism", and even "lead from drinking water or gasoline", or any number of other likely causes, to instead land on a caricature of American life feels a bit silly to me. Thats an acute risk associated with an activity most people don't participate in, and that even the people who do participate in, don't very often.
The book you linked appears to be about how the American educational system is conceptually flawed and approaches education in a way unlikely to yield meaningful critical thinking skills- a point I think I'd likely agree with it on. But to be fair, a book also isn't actually a quantitative reflection of poor critical thinking skills. It wouldn't totally suprise me if America did struggle with critical thinking, there are lots of possible reasons we might- and at the same time, it's a little frustrating for someone foreign to my country to look from the outside and say "man, I wonder if they're all dumb cause they have lead poisoning from shooting guns all the time" while providing evidence for the link between shooting and lead exposure (makes complete sense) but no evidence for the premise that we're dumb; that part is just taken for granted.
It kinda feels like you're asking if the caricature of us all shooting guns all the time is the reason for the caricaturization of us all being dumb. And in doing so, overlook much more systemic far-reaching explanations for how a nation might end up in a state where critical thinking skills are lacking.
I'm not wading into looking for evidence because the nature of these things is that it takes a looooot of evidence to dispute an idea that can be thrown out with only a little. My mental health is horrible and I don't really have the energy for that at present 😅 I think lots of other folks have made valuable contributions to the discussion, but I didn't see anyone speaking to the fact that this feels like it's borne out of an outsiders perspective based mostly on an imaginary idea of what it's like to live here.
I don't expect my expressing that idea to change your mind, but I still think it has value for providing perspective and context to the things you're considering. If you don't actually know much about the US first-hand, it might not be apparent that folks in the US are unlikely to see that a realistic source of the problem you're describing given the actual experience of living here.
All I really hope to add to the conversation is that perspective. Its fine if you don't see it the same way that I do, to be totally honest sometimes there are instances where being immersed in or "too close" to something impairs your ability to see it clearly. Though I don't think this is one of those times.
Sorry this is all over the place, I'm pretty spent and didn't have it in me to edit further for clarity (or try to be succinct, as you can probably tell by the like 30 paragraphs where a couple of more carefully thought out ones might have sufficed.)
There’s also the risk of lead from hunted meat.
hunted meat
Makes it sound like yous are running about in the woods shooting at packets of mince
You're half right, they're are brain damaged.
But bullets?
I don't know man. Seems unlikely. Leaded fuel and lead paint tho..?
#Lead Exposure in Last Century Shrank IQ Scores of Half of Americans
Leaded gasoline calculation to have stolen over 800 million cumulative IQ points since 1940s
A new study calculates that exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million IQ points from more than 170 million Americans alive today, about half the population of the United States.
https://today.duke.edu/2022/03/lead-exposure-last-century-shrunk-iq-scores-half-americans
Yeah idk. The more I read the comments and check out sources I think the question has at least some merit.
I’m taking in that cognitive impairments seem to really require cumulative exposure and the effects are delayed, but also anecdotes like this reddit post below make me think there is a nonzero number of Americans who are chronically exposed to elevated lead levels over a long period of time by frequent shooting (especially indoors) and not taking proper remedial measures.
Note that those results come from indoor range with incredibly bad air circulation (it specified that the ventilation system pushed the smoke back into your face). Outdoor shooting, and shooting a normal firing range with good (or even not actively bad) air circulation would probably yield significantly lower results.
It seems like outdoors would be somewhat better, but I’m not sure the specific premise of your comment is correct in that it seems to be much more important to use proper remediation in terms of cleanup rather than whether you shoot at a good indoor range or a bad one or even outdoors.
See, for example, this comment thread in that same post where the person states that a three day carbine course, which presumably occurred outdoors, left him testing at 13 a week later. Subsequently the person made sure to engage in proper cleaning rituals which have prevented a recurrence of the high blood lead levels
Lead, namely in its poor infrastructure and in old recipes that have survived to the present day, was also cited for the peoples' issues in the Roman Empire, discussed in contexts as wide as the common medical deformities and the madness of emperors like Caligula (spoiler alert, he wasn't actually mad, just creatively spiteful, e.g. his declaring war on Poseidon was to humiliate undisciplined soldiers). So this is not lead's first rodeo. I would give the research more time.