I think in the future they will consider us in the past complete idiots for using lead for anything except /maybe/ radiation shielding because of the neurotoxic effects and it being well known as a danger.
It will seem as dumb as using radium paint and radioactive "tonics" except that radiotherapy is a legitimate thing unlike lead therapy.
>I think in the future they will consider us in the past complete idiots for using lead for anything except /maybe/ radiation shielding because of the neurotoxic effects
Lead has a bunch of important uses, such as for solder (lead-free solder has problems with growing tin whiskers and is more brittle, so leaded solder is still used for safety-critical applications). It's safe as long as it's handled safely (e.g., don't do things that will make it airborne and then breathe it!), just like any other toxic substance. There's many, many materials that are highly toxic and dangerous, but are extremely useful, so you just need to handle them safely.
Because the toxins affect people other than the target. Some areas the US military has used for munitions testing have been declared Superfund sites. There are places in northern Europe so contaminated with arsenic and mercury from WWI munitions that they're predicted to be unsuitable for agricultural use for thousands of years.
What percentage of ammunition fired do you think kills people directly? And how many people do you think are exposed to that ammunition but not targeted by it?
It's sadly low in combat due to the chaos and lack of time to engage properly. It's similar to the police. It's something like 18-20% direct hits. What people who have never been military or police may not realize is that when your body goes into fight/flight mode, you lose your fine motor skills for gross motor skills. This is a very real thing. Training can compensate for this to a degree, but doesn't remove it. As the Corps used to say: "The more your sweat in peacetime the less you bleed in war." Also a person falls to the lowest level of training they have received during an incident. If you have developed great muscle memory and train hard, you should do fairly well. So many things come into play: learning how the weapon operates normally, how to tap/rack/bang, clear malfunctions, magazine changes, weapons maintenance--all these play a role in how well troops do when the chips are down.
It will seem as dumb as using radium paint and radioactive "tonics" except that radiotherapy is a legitimate thing unlike lead therapy.