18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY FEBRUARY 19-25, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com offering inferior ballistics, but to West it works just fine: He’s shooting squirrels from 100-plus yards away and pigs from over 200 yards without issue. And he usually gets enough ammo to do so through VWS’ free giveaway. “A box of large-caliber and small-caliber every year is all I need,” he says. “I’m sure other guys use more.” It’s those other guys who could potentially drive demand for .22LR non-lead bullets, persuading manufacturers to get back into making it. Sorenson is hoping they do, and VWS will be a ready buyer. Now, during California’s budget season, Sorenson is lobbying state lawmakers to support the non-lead ammunition program. He’s asking for $4.6 million over the next five years to help the nonprofit get more non-lead bullets to hunters. Currently VWS’ program distributes about $500,000 worth of ammo per year and Sorenson wants to double that, hopeful that by handing out $1 million worth of free bullets, condors can get to a sustainable population. If VWS is ready to buy bullets, he hopes that someone will be standing by to manufacture them. “If we don’t solve this, the condor is always going to be dying more than it can keep up breeding-wise,” Sorenson says. “Now we are faced with this huge gap knowing [lead ammunition] is the number-one threat to the species, and the number-one problem we can fix. “I know what needs to be done to save this species and at the same time keep the traditions of hunting and ranching alive. I want to scale our nonlead program up to a whole new level so we can once and for all solve this problem.” ••• Sorenson remembers when he first floated the idea among VWS donors of the organization getting involved in distributing non-lead ammunition. “It was a lukewarm response,” he says. But he understood that distributing and popularizing non-lead bullets was critical to the species’ survival. “We are much more aligned with the hunting and ranching community than the typical advocacy group,” he says. (It seems to be catching on; VWS recently received a $200,000 gift for its nonlead ammunition program from an anonymous donor.) In a paper set to be published this year by the California Fish and Wildlife Journal, Stake and Sorenson recount the plight of rimfire availability. “If non-lead ammunition for one of the most widely-used rifle calibers, the .22 67 LR, remains off the market, as it has been recently, it would not be surprising if some shooters are still shooting lead,” they wrote. “These shooters might otherwise follow the law if their local stores were able to stock non-lead .22 LR… “This absence is highly concerning, given that .22 LR is widely considered the most commonly used rifle caliber. We conducted a survey of local hunters in 2017 which confirmed widespread use of .22 LR in Central California.” In the paper, they propose several possible solutions to make rimfire more available and cost-effective. The state could exempt non-lead ammunition from an 11-percent excise tax on ammo, for example. “Instead of compounding the challenges hunters and ranchers face switching to non-lead ammunition through excise taxes and sales restrictions, efforts should focus instead on the main problem of how to improve availability of non-lead rimfire on the market,” they wrote. There’s also the barrier of California’s required background checks for every ammunition purchase, the rule that makes Stake’s old days of tailgate distribution a relic of the past. Stake needs to enter information into a California Department of Justice portal to run a background check for every ammunition acquisition, even if it’s a repeat customer (VWS pays the $5 fee each time). “Hunters liken it to presenting their driver’s license every time they fill up their car with gas,” Stake says. “It’s not a bad comparison.” Those 2016 rules, approved by voters as Prop. 63, also require vendors to provide ammo only face-to-face, rendering online ammunition sales in California all but impossible—shutting down a major channel for local hunters to acquire non-lead options. In 2018, Kim Rhode (an Olympic gold medalist in trap and skeet shooting), the California Rifle & Pistol Association and several other gun owners and out-of-state vendors sued California Attorney General Rob Bonta, arguing the policy violated their Second Amendment rights. In 2020, a federal court granted the plaintiffs an injunction, prohibiting California from enforcing the rules. Various facets of the case have since gone through appeals, with the most recent decision in 2025 upholding the lower court ruling to overturn California’s rules. But pending a further appeal—possibly to the U.S. Supreme Court—the circuit court granted the state’s request to stay the court’s own injunction, keeping the existing regulations in effort. Sorenson wrote a letter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, urging judges to issue a mandate implementing its ruling in favor of Rhode and the other plaintiffs. “Your court’s ruling recognized that the state’s face-to-face ammunition purchase requirement is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment,” he wrote. “Until the mandate issues, however, that unconstitutional barrier remains in effect—impeding lawful commerce and undermining conservation progress.” ••• We know that lead is highly toxic because of longstanding efforts to remove it from our environment. Leaded gasoline was banned in the U.S. in 1975. Lead-based paint was banned in 1978. “We’ve regulated other major sources,” Finkelstein says. Today, ammunition is the largest unregulated source of lead into the environment. (Other sources, such as batteries, are regulated, and not spread around in the environment.) That matters not just for condors, but to other wildlife—hawks, eagles, mountain lions, any animal scavenging has the potential to consume lead ammunition. It also matters for human health. The World Health Organization estimates that lead exposure has resulted in 21.7 million years lost to disability and death worldwide, due to the lasting effects of lead on health. It is toxic to the nervous system and brain, the kidneys, the reproductive system, the immune system. The science is not new. In 2013, Finkelstein joined a group of 30 scientists all over the country in issuing a consensus statement on lead ammunition in the environment. “Based on overwhelming evidence for the toxic effects of lead in humans and wildlife, even at very low exposure levels,” they wrote, “…we support reducing and eventually eliminating the introduction of lead into the environment from lead-based ammunition.” Finkelstein spends her time studying toxics in the environment yet still, 12 years after that statement was issued, she is optimistic. “I am an environmental toxicologist and I feel like this is something we can actually fix in my lifetime, which is incredibly encouraging,” she says. Stake first heard the word ornithology on a bird field trip when he was in the sixth grade. “My teacher was the one who told me that condors were about to go extinct,” he remembers. Now, one box of bullets at a time, he is helping enable the species to soar again. This demonstration piece at VWS shows the difference between a copper bullet (left) and a lead bullet, with the lead fragmenting as it mushrooms, increasing the probability that a scavenger will encounter a piece of the toxic metal. “Just the smallest little fragment can be deadly,” Kelly Sorenson says. DANIEL DREIFUSS “IF WE DON’T SOLVE THIS, THE CONDOR IS ALWAYS GOING TO BE DYING MORE THAN IT CAN KEEP UP BREEDING-WISE.”
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