Sportsmen’s Alliance reports that activists have filed a petition with the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission seeking to ban the use of traditional lead ammunition for taking wildlife in Colorado. The group says the petition is led by Wayne Pacelle, the former Humane Society of the United States executive who resigned amid sexual harassment allegations, and argues the proposal would make it unlawful to possess lead ammunition and a firearm capable of firing it while taking or attempting to take wildlife.
That is the opening move, hunters. Not the final rule. Not CPW approval. Not a done deal. But it is exactly how this stuff starts in Colorado: a petition, a process, a hearing, a “stakeholder conversation,” a few sad PowerPoints, and then suddenly the people who actually hunt are told the new rule is inevitable and they are extremists for noticing.
The Bullet Point Brief
- This is not about pretending lead ammunition is some sacred object. It is about activists using the CPW process to make hunting more expensive, more complicated, and easier to strangle one regulation at a time.
- Sportsmen’s Alliance says the petition would ban hunting with traditional lead ammunition in Colorado and target possession while hunting. Translation: this is not just a shelf-choice issue. It hits access, cost, tradition, availability, and ordinary working-class hunters who do not have nonprofit money to burn on boutique compliance gear.
- The article ties the petition to Wayne Pacelle, former HSUS executive, who resigned amid sexual harassment allegations. If national animal-rights operators are parachuting into Colorado to explain hunting ethics to people who buy tags, fund conservation, and know which end of the rifle points away from the truck, expect sportsmen to smell the setup.
- Sportsmen’s Alliance argues groups have pursued lead ammunition and tackle bans for years, including past efforts through the EPA, national forests, refuges, and state-level campaigns. Same sermon, different pulpit.
- Hunters bankroll wildlife management through licenses, excise taxes, gear, travel, conservation work, and actual participation. Then the activist class treats them like the problem. That is rich enough to need its own trust fund.
My Bottom Line
Call this what it is: conservation-by-strangulation.
Ban the tools. Restrict the methods. Raise the costs. Complicate the rules. Call it conservation. Then, when hunter participation drops, blame hunters for disappearing from the system activists helped make hostile.
Colorado’s professional activist class has a pattern. If they cannot get what they want at the ballot box or through the legislature, they go shopping for commissions, amendments, administrative levers, and quiet process doors where normal people are too busy working to babysit every damn meeting. That is not democracy. That is policy laundering with better footwear.
CPW should be about wildlife science, habitat, access, enforcement, and sustaining the North American model of conservation. It should not become another stage for people whose long-term vision of “ethical wildlife management” always somehow ends with fewer hunters and more rules written by people who do not hunt.
Hunters should pay attention now, not after the machine turns “petition” into “process,” “process” into “recommendation,” “recommendation” into “rule,” and “rule” into “why are you mad, we had a public comment window at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday?”
Colorado does not need more backdoor culture-war regulation dressed up as concern for wildlife. It needs honest conservation, accountable rulemaking, and respect for the sportsmen who have been funding wildlife management long before the activist-consultant crowd discovered another rural tradition to supervise.
Source: Sportsmen’s Alliance
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