re: Guns on movie sets: “Unreasonable and unrealistic” to expect actor to check load

You are trying to excuse something for some unknown reason that should not be excused. It is called personal responsibility.

If you are handed a pill from someone you barely know, and you don't have any idea what that pill is but the person you barely know says it is an aspirin are you going to give that pill to your child without checking it out?

Be honest.

The last guy to handle the pistol during the break for lunch" target practice", left a bullet or bullets in the weapon. Also negligent.

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He was handed a weapon that according to several accounts was told was “Cold”/ safe, why at that point would he think it was dangerous if he was not a gun owner, had never been instructed in gun safety?

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Why is anyone not familiar with gun safety handling firearms?

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I know it is hard for some to believe, but there are millions of people walking around that have never touched or fired a gun, didn’t grow up in a household with guns, and have zero knowledge of firearm safety, and some of them end up being actors in westerns

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Then they should be trained, they should take it upon themselves to take training. He pointed a gun at someone and shot them. That’s his fault, period.

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This is why they have armorers on the set. If you were cast in a war movie and given a hand grenade would you show up on set knowing how to distinguish a dummy grenade from one that had a pyrotechnic charge and could actually explode.? To most actors on a movie set a firearm is treated the same as the grenade, it is assumed the professional in charge of it has given them something safe to handle.

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This assumption is why someone is dead. Just because Hollywood and actors have been endearing people with their unsafe practices for decades doesn’t make Baldwin any less responsible.

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In what scenario is an actor pointing a gun at people who are not actors, and pulling the trigger? Baldwin, the actor, knows full well that there are safeguards in place against this very thing, which places production people out of danger.

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Look, I think AB is in the wrong. He should have checked the gun. But he isn't wrong for pointing the gun where he did. The scene called for it, for him to point the gun at the camera for cinematic effect. The 2 people shot were standing behind the camera.

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This assumption is why someone is dead. Just because Hollywood and actors have been endearing people with their unsafe practices for decades doesn’t make Baldwin any less responsible.

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Far more people have been killed or injured on movie sets doing scenes with cars, motorcycles, pyrotechnics, explosives, trains, helicopters, fall arrest rigging, animals. than guns. As far as I can find it stands at two deaths in the last 40 years. In all tother instances involving potentially hazardous situations it was the responsibility of trained professionals to assure everyone was safe, not the actor, why would a gun on a set be any different.

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If you are handed a pill from someone you barely know, and you don't have any idea what that pill is but the person you barely know says it is an aspirin are you going to give that pill to your child without checking it out?

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That would be quite different than a professional armorer trained to assure firearms used on a movie set handing me a firearm and saying it is safe.

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Look, I think AB is in the wrong. He should have checked the gun. But he isn't wrong for pointing the gun where he did. The scene called for it, for him to point the gun at the camera for cinematic effect. The 2 people shot were standing behind the camera.

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But that isn’t how it works. How it normally works is the people who would normally be behind the camera are in another place entirely, watching monitors when a firearm is involved in the scene. Baldwin, having 40 years of experience would know this, both as an actor and a producer. Now what?

I believe you are putting way more faith in an underpaid, low budget, overworked "armorer" than you should.

Even in my military days at the range when a Red Hat handed me a weapon my responsibility was to check for myself what the status of the weapon was, not take his word for it.

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This was a negligent discharge and not an accidental discharge.

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Eh, this is semantics and in the gun biz it's all an AD (accidental discharge). Save that shite for the lawyers.

If an armorer/gun wrangler gives an actor a gun and says it's cold then that's it. Now, if the AD did that without the armorer making that determination, it's a frick up.

That's the whole purpose of an armorer.

This was a huge frick up and again I think Alec Baldwin is a prick. But if the armorer says it's cold, it's done. You don't want people who don't even know how to handle guns manipulating them and fricking with them trying to verify whether they are clear or not., they don;t have the expertise in the first place. On the set, it's not their job.

If the expert hired by the production, with AB's oversight, is proven to be incompetent, and there was evidence of that prior to this incident, then that is a whole separate set of negligent acts by the production staff. Based on some of the reporting of several people on the set prior to this incident it appears there was definitely a problem with armorer's and procedures.