Actually, most bullets are at least partially jacketed to minimize the amount of lead abraded into the gun barrel.
Spraying ammo is expensive enough even at current prices. Twice a year my local gun range hosts a manufacturer’s show where you can rent full-auto guns to fire on the range. 100 rounds of ammo, or four magazine’s worth for a Uzi, goes in a minute or two even if you stick with short bursts.
There is very little free lead found in nature. If there were, our bodies would likely be able to cope with it. The only reason there are significant quantities of pure lead is that we extract and refine it. But we are getting way off the subject. So somebody (me) is going to start a “How bad is lead anyway?” thread.
I wonder how iridium alloy bullets would work, if cost were no option. Like say, for armor piercing or ultra-long range sniping.
The EPA has rejected the petition by environmental groupsto ban lead ammunition.
Gotta love how the subject was phrased: “EPA Surrenders to NRA on Gun Control Issue”. As in OUR lobby group is good and THEIRS is evil. I was pleasantly surprised that for once a US federal agency decided that it did NOT have carte blanche power to extend it’s jurisdiction anywhere it wants.
Still, I remember a few years ago here in Minnesota there was a to-do about how venison donated to food shelves was discovered to contain surprisingly high amounts of lead fragments, to the point that they were considering rejecting all such donations.
The OP has been answered but I thought I’d mention a couple of technical points.
You can make bullets out of practically anything. The Soviet Union allegedly used “bullets” made from wadded paper from the pages of Pravda for point blank, back-of-the-head executions. The original KTW high penetration pistol bullet (the infamous “cop killer”) was made from tungsten alloy for density and hardness, but was later switched to steel with no drop in performance. The French THV hollow bullet had an overall low density and a very high muzzle velocity. The restricted-penetration glaser bullet is similarly low density.
For handguns, density isn’t that much of an issue as the lighter weight, lower density bullets (copper or steel) simply emerge from the muzzle faster. They don’t retain velocity so well over distance, but this is no problem over the sorts of ranges you can expect to hit anything with a handgun. Penetration on impact may be reduced which could be a problem with the smaller calibres. Another matter is polygonal rifling. A conventionally rifled pistol barrel is a cylindrical tube with spiral grooves for gripping the bullet jacket and spinning the bullet. With polygonal rifling, the barrel has a polygonal cross-section with a twist, and re-shapes the whole bullet somewhat as it passes down it. Pistols with polygonal rifling can’t fire non-deformable bullets such as the KTW and I don’t know how well they’d cope with copper or steel.
If there ever were a ban on lead bullets, I’d expect to see annealed steel bullets as the main replacement for pistol ammo, simply on grounds of cheapness. Some kind of coating might be needed to stop them going rusty though.
Rifle bullets are a whole different matter. The lower density alternatives will lose velocity with distance faster than lead, which will restrict range, reduce long-distance accuracy and reduce the terminal effect of the projectiles. Tungsten OTOH would allow a greater bullet density than lead. Hunting rounds are often softpoint to allow expansion on impact, which may be a difficult characteristic to design into tungsten bullets. Tungsten has a very high melting point which means it is not normally melted to shape it (or even to smelt it from ore). Instead it is extracted and processed as a powder and sintered into monolithic lumps. Not easy or cheap to make anything remotely complex from it!
Military rifle bullets famously have to be fully jacketed or otherwise “non expanding” so military rifle and ammo combinations tend to aim at producing marginal bullet stability. The bullet spin is only just enough to stop the projectile flipping end-over-end in the air. (In the old Lee Enfield .303 rifles this was achieved by using an aluminium tip to the bullets, to push the centre of gravity of the bullet rearwards.) This means that the bullets tend to somersault in the target when they hit, and a bullet travelling sideways does more to a person than a bullet travelling point first. Some bullets such as the 5.56 NATO reliably fragment after turning sideways at high velocity. A tungsten alternative might lose this tendency to fragment, and with the same rifling might even punch clean through the target without somersaulting, reducing the chances of killing or seriously injuring the target considerably. A way around this might be to use tungsten powder distributed in matrix of lower-density metal to end up with the same overall weight as a lead bullet.
Eventually of course, the next generation of rifles and ammo would be designed to take advantage of the different bullet materials and you’d end up with long copper bullets, tungsten-cored steel or other alternatives, with rifling to suit.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s also the issue of stopping and/or killing power – which is, let’s face it, a pretty relevant factor for a bullet. As I understand it, a lead bullet will expand once it hits anything like water or big masses of protein like animal life. Besides creating a bigger wound, that also helps to rapidly decelerate the bullet within the target, sending a bigger jolt through the internal organs. A steel bullet, on the other hand, will just zip on through without changing shape and without stopping. It certainly can kill you, but not with as high a probability as a lead bullet.
Handgun bullets may or may not expand, depending on the bullet design. hollowpoint bullets are designed to expand but aren’t guaranteed to do so - it depends how fast they’re going when they hit, what clothing they pass through etc. You’re absolutely correct that a monolithic steel bullet isn’t going to expand and it’s probably going to take some clever designs to get expansion out of non-lead bullets. That said, the “black talon” design, where the jacket was pre-weakened along axial lines and opened up like a flower on impact, could be revived for non-lead bullets.
The other factor you mention, the “jolt” sent through the internal organs, doesn’t really apply to handgun rounds. Handgun bullets do their destructive work by punching a relatively big deep hole through something important. The term “hydrostatic shock” used to get bandied around a lot in reference to the terminal effect of bullets, but the truth is that simple compression shockwaves from bullets passing through tissue aren’t high enough amplitude to do any damage. A second effect, the “temporary shock cavity” refers to the fact that the wound channel from a bullet is momentarily several times the bullet diameter due to material being flung aside by the bullet’s passage. Most tissues are elastic and snap back into position once the bullet has passed (brain and liver being exceptions) but a large temporary shock cavity e.g. from a big fast rifle bullet can exceed the elastic limits of tissue and inflict additional damage. Handgun bullets don’t travel fast enough for their temporary shock cavities to be significant though.
A really low density handgun bullet such as the French THV can have a screaming muzzle velocity and the hard sub-calibre point meant it could punch through steel plate, but when it got into tissue it wouldn’t penetrate very far. This could be an issue with handgun stopping power, in that when shooting a big fat person or with the bullet passing through an arm before reaching the body, the bullet could run out of steam before going deep enough to hit anything important.