Another “Pants on Fire rating by Politifact, my favorite
conservative (but honest) fact checker”
"Back door
gun control is in full effect in the United States" due to "Obama’s
Environmental Protection Agency." - Allen West wrote on Monday, December
2nd, 2013 in a blog on his website. West
blames 'Obama's EPA' for closing a smelter as evidence of 'back door gun
control'
So who the hell is Allen West? He’s a failed (one term and
out) former Republican Florida
Congressman who has taken aim at a surprising gun control villain: the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency. "It
seems that back door gun control is in full effect in the United States. Why?
Thanks to Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), we can no longer smelt
lead from ore in the United States. ...," wrote the Republican and retired
Army lieutenant colonel on his website Dec. 1. "So America, back door gun
control is moving forward and while we are all distracted with Obamacare and
Iran nuclear negotiations, our Second Amendment rights are undergoing an
assault by clandestine infiltration."
West’s “explanation” in brief: The Doe Run lead smelter in Herculaneum,
Missouri will close its doors this month due to air quality restrictions.
"What this all means," West wrote, "is that after December 2013,
any ammunition that will be available to US citizens will have to be imported,
which will surely increase the price and possibly come under government
control."
Is West correct to conclude that the EPA’s actions are
"back door gun control"? A reader asked us to check West’s claim, so
we did
Lead’s dangers: Lead is a serious health hazard. According
to the Mayo Clinic, "even small amounts of lead can cause serious health
problems. Children under the age of 6 are especially vulnerable to lead
poisoning, which can severely affect mental and physical development. At very
high levels, lead poisoning can be fatal." Lead contamination can be found
in air, water and soil as well as homes from old paint. Lead-based paint and
lead-contaminated dust in older buildings are the most common sources of lead
poisoning in children. Adults who work with batteries, home renovations or in
auto repair shops also may be exposed to lead. The health dangers prompted the
U.S. to phase out leaded gasoline in the 1980s. (my note: during the
Reagan Administration!)
As Doe Run announced at the time, the company reached a
settlement with the EPA and the state of Missouri in 2010 which included paying
fines and ceasing smelting operations in Herculaneum. But the news is gaining
fresh attention now because the actual closure date of Dec. 31 is fast
approaching. .
West’s blog cited an Oct. 29 post by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
on noisyroom.net which slammed the feds for "back door gun control"
in driving the plant to closure. ( West’s initial post failed to cite noisyroom
but later updated with attribution.) Monroe-Hamilton
sent us to a post she wrote Dec. 3 in response to the controversy, in which she
said what she wrote was an "opinion piece." (ed note: Monroe-Hamilton is hard
to track down, even Google has no pictures of her, but a brief read of any of
her “opinion” pieces shows her ability to tell “The Big Lie” is about on a par
with Hitler.
The long history of lead-control efforts casts serious doubt
on the idea that the closure was driven by anti-gun concerns. Ever since the
EPA was created in 1970, one of its missions has been to limit pollution from
smelters which are "terribly toxic sites," said David Rosner, a
professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University who studies the politics
of pollution. The Doe Run smelter, he says, was shut down because it was a
major polluter -- not as a way of curbing guns. "It had nothing to do with
gun control or bullets," Rosner told PolitiFact. "The idea of linking
this to an issue of gun control or a surreptitious way for the government
trying to shut down the gun industry is nuts. This was an EPA decision because
of children who were being poisoned by what had come out of that plant."
While West, who represented South Florida for one term,
pointed the finger at "Obama’s" EPA, the EPA’s case against Doe Run
actually began decades ago. The St. Louis area failed to meet federal clean air
standards for lead in 1987 -- during the Reagan administration -- due to
emissions from the smelter, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in 1989. Reagan wasn't the only Republican president to advance the anti-lead
effort. In 2008, under President George W. Bush, the EPA adopted tougher air
quality standards for lead that were 10 times more stringent than the past. It is, in fact, the tougher Bush era standards which are forcing the closure!
In 2010, the EPA reached a settlement with Doe Run. In
November, Doe Run issued a news release about the closure: "Although the
United States is home to a number of secondary lead smelters, which recycle
lead from various sources, the Herculaneum facility is the last primary lead
smelter in the United States," according to the release. The release
explains that the company isn’t shutting down entirely. While the company is
closing its primary smelter, which extracts lead from ore, it will continue to
operate as a secondary lead smelter -- essentially a recycler for lead
contained in other products.
According to the company, more than 80 percent of all lead
produced in the United States is used in either vehicle batteries or in
stationary batteries for backup power used by the military and in
telecommunications and medical applications."In the U.S., the recycle rate
of these batteries is approximately 98 percent, making lead-based batteries the
most highly recycled consumer product," the company release said. "These
batteries are recycled at secondary lead smelters. We own such a smelter in
southern Missouri."
The company added that lead is used in ammunition and other
materials. Doe Run spokeswoman Tammy Stankey emailed PolitiFact to say that the company "will continue to supply our ammo customers using
secondary lead."
Michael Bazinet, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports
Foundation, confirmed that lead used for ammunition made in
the U.S. comes almost exclusively from recycled sources.
"While no one should ever be pleased about the closure
of any industry, in this case there should not be a noticeable effect on consumers. ... We should not see any effect on the
civilian marketplace," Bazinet told PolitiFact. The foundation’s general
counsel, Lawrence Keane, echoed that view in an interview with the Washington
Times. Others agree. While Doe Run is the last "primary" lead smelter
in the U.S. there are plenty of "secondary" processing of lead in the
U.S., Richard Lowden, a research engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy Oak
Ridge National Laboratory told PolitiFact in an email. "Primary lead is of higher purity and is needed for
specialty applications such as unique types of lead-acid batteries,"
Lowden said. "Secondary lead is slightly less pure and is used in most
applications -- over 80 percent of domestic consumption, including bullets. The
U.S. imports very little lead, with the main foreign sources being Canada and
Mexico. I do not believe shooters have
to worry about a source of lead for bullets." Florida Bullet, a
Clearwater-based company (across the state from West’s former district) that
supplies ammunition to most law enforcement agencies in Florida, isn’t worried
about the smelter’s closure. The bullets the company sells, made
by Federal and Speer, "use reclaimed lead, so this is not going to bother
us as far as production goes," said the company’s president,
Tom Falone. "We don’t foresee this being a problem for us."
When asked why he blamed Obama if the EPA had zeroed in on the smelter long before Obama was president,Michele Hickford, West’s spokeswoman responded with one of the most illogical and partisan explanations
we have heard in a while: "The plant closed under Obama. Regardless of
what this lead plant is used for, the EPA net is tightening on the entire
industry, and if you follow it to its logical conclusion, the industry will be
shut down eventually. This is yet another example of the Obama administration
circumventing the legislative process to achieve its goals."
Our (Politifact’s) ruling:
West wrote that "back door gun control is in full
effect in the United States" due "to Obama’s Environmental Protection
Agency."
There is no evidence that it was a clandestine effort at
back door gun control. Rather, the EPA’s settlement with Doe Run --
which concluded a case that began years before Obama was elected president --
had to do with emissions of a chemical that can cause serious injury and death
to adults and children. And ammunition experts shot massive holes in
the notion that the smelter’s closure would cut production, reduce supply or
raise the cost of ammunition. Pants on Fire!
So
why post this article at all? I do so because it shows yet again
the lengths of
innuendo and outright lies to which the far right,
including a former Congressman
(did I mention he’s also African
American?) will go to slander this president. All of the
initiatives regarding primary lead smelting began under Nixon, who
to his
credit, established the EPA, and continued through the
present. Blaming any
president for this action is ultra-partisan,
ludicrous and infantile – which come
to think of it, describes the
Tea partiers fairly aptly.
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