A casual glance of the stats shows that one of the more popular posts on The Green Man is "The Facts on Gun Deaths In The USA".

It may be stating the obvious but the reason that guns cause death is because of the introduction of lead into the unfortunate recipients body. This is usually in the form of a solid piece of lead, also known as a bullet. However lead can also enter the body through ingestion and in this form it causes heavy metal posioning. Not nearly as dramatic as a gun shot wound still it can be equally effective in separating the body from the soul.

Donald Rimstidt, a professor in the Department of Geosciences, College of Science at Virginia Tech calculates that 20 million metric tons of lead bullets have been fired in the United States in the 20th century. That's a lot of heavy metal that has been introduced into the US environment. From TV you would surmise that the bulk of this lead is either in cities from shoot outs or in the wilderness from hunting. This is not in fact the case, the bulk of Americans do their shooting on rifle ranges. In 10 years a rifle range accumulates 12 tonnes of lead bullets and a shotgun range 10 tonnes of lead shot.

From an optimistic perspective this environmental contamination is limited because lead does not easily find its way into surface or ground water and contaminates only the top few inches of soil where it lands. Never the less it is still a significant enviromental contaminant and monitoring will be necessary to ensure that the change in the enviromental dynamics from the introduction of all this lead do not have impacts that we have not foreseen.

Read more on Dr Don's research here.