If you’ve been shooting for a few years, it’s time to get your blood lead levels checked.
I first met Tom in 2011 at the MGM Ironman 3-gun match, a legendary, high round count blast fest in the Idaho desert. We bullshitted between stages, hit it off, and the bromance continues to this day. At the time, he’d just returned from a deployment, and was 230 pounds of tattoos and hate, the archetypal Special Forces senior NCO who’d been blown up twice and shot once, recovering and returning to duty each time.
Evidently, the only thing that could kill Tom … was Tom.
Fast-forward a couple of years and we ran into each other at some firearms industry event or other. He’d lost 60 pounds and was moving like a 90-year-old-man. “What’s wrong with you, dude?” I asked. “That’s the trouble,” he replied. “No one knows.”
If you’ve ever seen someone waste away in front of your eyes, you know what a punch to the gut it can be, and I was pretty sure I was going to be shopping for a new dark suit and black tie in the next couple of months.
Fortunately, at that same Idaho 3-gun match was EJ Redding, who became part of the Tom circle. EJ is a force of nature, a grizzly bear of a man who’s a Montana potato farmer for most of the year, and a state lobbyist in the offseason. Knowing people who have the ear of politicians is occasionally a good thing, and EJ interceded on Tom’s behalf, getting a tame senator to lean on the VA, who wound up sending him to the Mayo Clinic in Cleveland.
It turned out that Tom was dying of heavy metal poisoning. Whether it was through years of running suppressed Mk18s in shoot houses or through exposure on target sites in sandy places, his levels of lead and other heavy metals were off the charts.
It turns out, among shooters, it’s not as uncommon as you’d think.
It’s Seemingly Everywhere
Lead is used in many industries, and while levels of lead contamination in the United States have come way down in the past 50 years, there’s still a risk of encountering contamination outside of the range. Since its use as an anti-knock agent in gasoline was discontinued in 1996, the biggest source of lead compounds in the environment has been removed.
And one upside to being one of the most widely distributed and longest-used poisons is that we have a pretty good handle on symptoms and treatments. Or at least we used to. Because the average citizen nowadays has such limited lead exposure, testing for heavy metals is usually not included in annual physicals … and the medical community has lost the tribal knowledge we used to have regarding heavy metal poisoning.
Unfortunately, symptoms can be varied, diverse and shared with many other causes, which can make diagnosis more difficult, especially if a physician lacks experience in dealing with heavy metals. Chronic lead exposure can lead to fatigue, problems with sleep, headaches and anemia, as well as a lack of concentration, depression, nausea, abdominal pain, lack of appetite, loss of coordination and numbness and tingling in the hands and feet.
Lead concentration is measured in micrograms per deciliter of blood. An ideal concentration would be zero, but the CDC has set the bar for a concerning blood lead level at 10ug/dl—above this and you should get treatment. Most symptoms usually start at around 40ug/dl, and things get worse from there.
In its solid, metallic form, the risk posed by lead is negligible, unless you’re dumb enough to swallow it. It’s only when it reacts with other elements to form soluble lead salts that it becomes a problem, as these can then enter the bloodstream.
Hydrochloric acid in your stomach will react with metallic lead to produce lead hydrochloride, so make sure you take the usual precautions to minimize exposure when visiting the range. Don’t eat or smoke until you’ve thoroughly washed your hands, and if you’ve spent all day on an indoor range, at least change your outer clothes before returning home. Lead dust will be present on your clothing, and you’ll be exposing your family to it when you walk in the door.
Thirty-five to 40 percent of inhaled lead dust will be deposited in the tiny air sacs of your lungs, with the remainder being exhaled. Of that amount, 95 percent will be absorbed into the bloodstream, and 15 percent of that will be deposited in your bones and organs.
Lead salts are commonly used as priming compounds and hence are present in the propellant gases created every time you press the trigger. If you shoot suppressed, you’re going to be exposed to more gas than uncivilized heathens, so if your eyes are watering after sending a few rounds downrange from your favorite AR, it might be time to think about a better charging handle and an adjustable gas block. Or switching to a piston gun.
Diagnosis And Treatment
So, what do you do if you think you might have been exposed to heavy metals? Get tested, right?
Not so fast.
If you go to your primary care provider and ask them to refer you to be tested, it’s almost a certainty that they’ll sign you up for a regular workplace-type testing protocol, which measures the levels of toxins in your bloodstream.
“Normal blood level testing for chronic exposure to heavy metals is next to useless,” explained Dr. Yu-Ree Hyun, a naturopathic doctor in Scottsdale, Arizona. “Because your body can’t process and excrete heavy metals very well, they end up being stored in bone, organs and fat tissues. In order to test with any degree of accuracy, you have to knock them out of the tissues and into the bloodstream—we use the same procedure for treatment.”
Chelation therapy is a process whereby chemicals are introduced to the body that bind to lead and other heavy metals to form stable compounds, which can then be processed and excreted through either urine or feces. Usually administered through a series of intravenous infusions, it’s similar to chemotherapy in cancer patients and can take the same amount of time, with comparable side effects. In milder cases, oral chelators can be taken. Yes, you’re going to feel like sh!t for the duration of treatment, but it’s better than long-term illness or death.
Tom wound up undergoing chelation therapy for almost 2 years, after testing showed blood lead levels of 3300ug, as well as concentrations of barium, antimony, mercury, thallium and tin, which should have killed a normal human. He has follow-up treatments every 6 months but is back to picking up 500 pounds off the floor and spends the best part of his retirement with his two young kids, teaching them outdoor and survival skills, taking them to wrestling and Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes, and, yes, shooting.
In case you were wondering about the meaning of the headline of this article, R53.83, it’s the IDC-10 Diagnosis Code for the heavy metal challenge test. Your physician is probably unaware of it; share it with them and ask to be tested. Unless you take agency for your own health, you’re not going to find out if you’re being poisoned by the activity you love.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the 2025 suppressor special issue of Gun Digest the Magazine.
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