Good discussion! Most ammo is jacketed these days, but if you ever shoot any non-jacketed ammo you’ll get lead coming out of the barrel for a long time afterwards. Even after pretty thorough cleaning.

The stuff on .22 bullets is plating, not jacketing, and doesn’t really cut down on the lead plume at all. It’s nowhere near as thick as the depth of the rifling. Shooting .22 is like huffing lead plume, with a side of dirty primer and powder smoke. It’s so good for plinking though.

Kinetic energy from a projectile is equal to the mass of the projectile times the square of the velocity, but air resistance saps velocity off quite rapidly and independently of the mass. So a heavy projectile will deliver more kinetic energy to a target than a lighter one with the same initial velocity.

A lighter projectile can be driven faster by the same charge of propellant, but air resistance increases with the cube of the velocity so delivering more energy through increased velocity is a losing game. You can decrease air resistance by decreasing the cross section of the projectile, but that requires dense materials like lead.

tldr: the difference is absolutely not minuscule. There’s a reason why bullets are made of dense materials.

Lead from the bullet does actually come out of the barrel in a particularly impressive plume of particulate matter that you then breathe in. It’s caused by friction with the barrel and cuts from the rifling, but it’s very effectively reduced by using jacketed bullets. Just FYI.

🐈💩

Get out of here with this tired stuff.

All of this (gestures broadly) is the direct and inevitable result of lesser-evilism. A few people not sitting out the last election may have delayed this timeline (though I’m doubtful there were even enough protest-non-voters to make any difference), but this has been building for a long time and Harris hadn’t talked about any plans to reverse that trend.