It looks like the drum roll for banning lead is getting louder by the day.
Steel seems to be the best viable alternative- and as a bonus iron is cheaper than lead so the price of cartridges should come down.
Does anyone have any experience with it?
You’re right, steel is on its way for all disciplines except perhaps trap where lead can be relatively easily contained and harvested.
In summary, here’s the problems:
1. It damages guns, particularly older models and those with thin barrel walls.
2. It’s noisy and for a sport fighting a constant battle against noise complainers that’s bad news.
3. It has to shot through plastic wads (given current technology) and with all the palaver about single use plastics that’s problematic.
4. It ricochets. For this reason many grounds, on the advice of their insurance companies, have banned it.
5. It’s hugely inferior to lead from a ballistic point of view. See the video below:
The culmination of all this woe is the demise of the sport as we know it. Targets will have to be pulled in to allow for steel’s poor performance. Grounds designed around anything that poses a ricochet risk will have to be redesigned, that’s assuming they can find an insurance company prepared to cover the risk. Events like FITASC and English Sporting will have to change considerably.
To a certain extent it doesn’t really matter though. The sport’s caught in a perfect storm of a lack of mainstream media coverage, increasingly burdensome legislation, an ageing demographic and ever stringent environmental pressures. What’s more, we’ve a governing body that talks a good game but, in reality, has very little influence or power. Unlike the NRA there’s nobody fighting our corner
I’m afraid, as I see it, organised clay shooting in the UK’s probably got 10-15 years before it dies a natural death.
