Former Assemblyman Pedro Nava this past Sunday penned an opinion piece in his local paper, the Santa Barbara News-Press, encouraging Gov. Jerry Brown to sign Assembly Bill 711, which will require the use of nonlead ammunition for all hunting in California, beginning in 2019. Unfortunately, the piece is behind the newspaper's paywall, but here are two key excerpts:

It took us a few thousand years, but in the 1970s humanity finally reached a consensus that lead is a highly toxic substance on par with mercury and arsenic. Concerned about the amount of lead that children and adults were encountering, we subsequently prohibited its use in everything from gasoline and paint to plumbing materials and toys.

But while we've taken steps to reduce human exposure to lead, our efforts to protect the rest of the world's occupants remain incomplete. Thankfully, here in California, new legislation sitting on the governor's desk stands to go a long way toward removing what scientists are calling the single largest source of lead knowingly discharged into the environment: lead from ammunition.

Assembly Bill 711, authored by Assembly member Anthony Rendon, will require that beginning in 2019, all hunters in California will be required to use nonlead ammunition. This bill has already passed out of the Assembly and the Senate, and Gov. Jerry Brown should sign it.

Nava concludes:

In the last several decades we've tried to resolve the problem of lead from ammunition in a number of ways, beginning with the least inconvenient. While this is partly due to our desire to accommodate the needs of the state's hunting community, it frankly has also been due to an intransigent gun lobby whose ideological blindness has obliterated what used to be commonsense discussions of conservation policy.

With Assembly Bill 711, Californians are finally realizing that it's time to stop playing around with this issue. The lead in ammunition continues to act as a headwind to our efforts to protect California natural treasures, and unnecessarily exposes our families to a known toxin. Gov. Brown should do the right thing and sign Assembly Bill 711.

In the piece, Nava notes that it took him three attempts in the 2000s to pass legislation requiring nonlead ammunition for hunting within the range of the California Condor. He ultimately succeeded in 2007 with the passage of Assembly Bill 821.