I have been thinking a lot since the election about what could explain the incredibly high numbers of Americans who seem incapable of critical thinking, or really any kind of high level rational thought or analysis.
Then I stumbled on this post https://old.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/16ires5/lead_exposure_from_shooting_is_a_much_more/
Which essentially explains that “Shooting lead bullets at firing ranges results in elevated BLLs at concentrations that are associated with a variety of adverse health outcome"
I looked at the pubmed abstract in that Reddit post and also this one https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5289032/
Which states, among other things, “Workers exposed to lead often show impaired performance on neurobehavioral test involving attention, processing, speed, visuospatial abilities, working memory and motor function. It has also been suggested that lead can adversely affect general intellectual performance.”
Now, given that there are well in excess of 300 million guns in the United States, is it possible lead exposure at least partially explains how brain dead many Americans seem to be?
This is a genuine question not a troll and id love to read some evidence to the contrary if any is available
Also bear in mind that leaded gas was the norm til the mid 90s, so a lot of boomers and Gen X were exposed
Holy shit. I gues lemmy is a pretty young place for you to say something so completely wrong and get so many upvotes for it. Most cars have been “unleaded gasoline only” since the mid to late 70"s.
Think about it. Do you think those cars from the 1990’s still on the road today have all had engine and fuel pump swaps on them to run unleaded? Heck no. Most all the cars you’re going to find from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s all still say “unleaded fuel only” by the gas gauge. Most gas stations in the 1980’s didn’t even offer leaded gasoline.
was the norm
In the US, it was only banned from being sold in 1996, but it wasn’t the norm for long before that. The last model year that leaded gas was allowed for cars was 1974. Yes, all Boomers and most of Gen X would have had high exposure, but it would have been fading out by the time younger Gen Xers were born.
And yes there are some non-car applications of it that are still legal to this day, but the overall frequency of it would have dropped a ton well before the mid-90s. (Source, and actual graphs of the decline over time)
They’re trying again. AvGas has always been more of a challenge, more resistant to change, but also a niche market segment. They were also trying twenty years ago when I did some flying, but progress has been glacial. Personally I always hoped we’d get new engines that could run on jet fuel, so avgas could just go away ( one of the things holding back general aviation is cost, and jet fuel is much cheaper). We should probably treat land near airports as contaminated, but there really aren’t many airports and the number continues to shrink
