On Obama’s last day in office, only hours before Trump would be sworn in as President, the Obama administration issued an order that made it illegal to use lead bullets and fishing tackle on federal lands. Former director of the U.S. Department of Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service, Dan Ashe, signed Director’s Order No. 219 just one day before Trump took office, which banned “the use of nontoxic ammunition and fishing tackle on Service lands, waters and facilities and for certain types of hunting and fishing regulated by the Service.”
On Thursday, on his first day as Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke signed a Secretarial Order that would repeal the lead ammunition ban. Repealing this ban was one of his first actions. Lawrence Keane, of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said this was Obama’s “parting shot” against the hunting community by trying to phase out the use of lead ammunition on federal land.
The order also set the framework favoring gun control tactics of using “science” to re-enforce pre-existing policy goals, rather than to guide those goals in the first place. In exact words, the order read, “The Service will continue to support targeted research to understand the human, fish, and wildlife health benefits of using nontoxic ammunition and fishing tackle.”
Zinke overturned this ban with Secretarial Order 3346.
S.O. 3346 “revokes Director’s Order 219.” Moreover, S.O. 3346 is effective immediately. The Trump Administration is working feverishly to reverse the Obama-era gun control measures. On February 28, President Trump signed the repeal of Obama’s Social Security gun ban based on the fact that “would prevent some Americans with disabilities from purchasing or possessing firearms” and “could endanger the Second Amendment rights of law abiding citizens.”
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