The difference in pay rate for the non-union armorer -- who don't make much money ~35k a year on average in New Mexico - might have been less than 5k.
My guess, this will finally spur some regulations. Non-union armorers don't exactly have the money for lobbyists.
~35k a year
what the fuck? starvation wages for handling guns on a movie set?
It is not a full time job for most people, they only work a few months a year if they are lucky in places like New Mexico.
Most gun scenes are shot in a week or two for most productions and then they move on.
My guess, this will finally spur some regulations
It's regulations that improve labor and safety, lol. That will never happen in today's America. We're lucky they don't mandate live rounds all the time and tell them to "figure it out"
Safety regulations are written in blood - when the cost becomes high enough.
This is the country that when Air Traffic Controllers went on strike in the 80s because of unsafe conditions, they were all fired
Correct, but republicans get hard at the thought of anything anti-worker
Non-union armorers don’t exactly have the money for lobbyists.
Uhhh, the companies they work for do.
These non-union folk are almost all solo contractor acts from my understanding.
The actual big league armorer companies are union. Because of sanity and not wanting civil lawsuits.
"See? This wouldn't have happened if there was a good guy with a prop gun around."
live rounds are cheaper.
You're supposed to disarm them by removing the blasting cap and the powder, but someone got lazy
I'm not sure I follow - how do you get the pop n smoke from the gun without the powder?
You don't, you remove powder and caps from prop bullets so like loose ones sitting on a table, or for when a character loads a gun, close ups of mags and revolvers etc.
Then when doing shooting scenes, you unload those and load in blanks. If the armorer wasn't properly trained, they may have either used actual live rounds that got left in during a switch to blanks or just done a poor job of disarming the bullets.
I’m not sure what they’re basing that off of, it seems like the union rep just said that? Cops said they’re still not sure what was fired. And I mean, cops, but accidental death investigations aren’t a place acab super applies lmao
And I mean, cops, but accidental death investigations aren’t a place acab super applies lmao
why not
My assumption is that the point was that theres no real reason to cast doubts on the investigation of something like this and instead go to other sources like an uninvolved union rep for what happened.
Yeah pretty much. Necessary function with no big incentive to do sketchy shit. Not my best phrasing, still fuck cops obviously. Just “They have no incentive to lie and they probably have access to the most information here”
I mean it seems to put forth they'd give a shit here about clearing this up and running that assumption, why would they?
I mean just at the basic level that most people kind of care about doing their job when it doesn’t conflict with other interests - Cops just usually have other interests that conflict with doing good things, or their job is explicitly to do bad. Plus “Alec Baldwin killed someone” is pretty interesting and I bet even cops are like “Huh that’s interesting I want to know how that happened”
I'm picturing the prop master as Danny McBride's character from Tropic Thunder
He probably got the prop gun mixed up with one of the 15 handguns he always keeps strapped to his person
