Prosecutors announced that actor Alec Baldwin will be charged with involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer who was killed on a New Mexico movie set
I'm kinda a fuckhead but gun safety is paramount. Treat every gun as if it's loaded. Never put your finger on the trigger until you are ready to fire. Never shoot unless you know what is behind your target. Baldwin broke all those rules. He can get fucked. "Tools not toys" was drilled into my head from a young age.
Yeah wtf its a gun on a movie set. You're supposed to point it at other people and pull the trigger. I think you could have a reasonable expectation that the gun was not loaded with real bullets.
In this case Baldwin's production company cheaped out on having an experienced (and unionized) armorer be in charge of the guns and got some producer's faildaughter to do it instead. Nepotism directly caused the accident, and blame in this case might correctly float to the person in charge.
All gun safety rules are built with redundancy so that this doesn't happen even if a rule gets broken. You have to break at least two or three rules to actually hurt someone. Like, someone might fuck up at some point and flag someone with their muzzle, but as long as their finger is off the trigger, the gun isn't going to fire and nobody is going to get hurt.
One of the rules for an environment like a movie set -- the most important one, and by far the easiest to follow -- is that live ammo shouldn't be anywhere near the set at all. It isn't a unique one either, since similar rules are followed with many people's firearm storage and maintenance practices -- you keep your guns separate from your ammo unless you need to have both of them. Another one is that multiple people are supposed to verify what, if anything, is loaded into the gun, before handing it off to the actor. The actor is also supposed to follow the normal rules of firearm safety to the greatest extent that is possible for the scene. Everyone who was responsible for safety here failed at all of their jobs simultaneously, which allowed this to happen.
I'd side with you if it was on camera/during a scene but this was him fucking around with an unknowingly loaded gun between scenes. When I clean my guns and do a dry fire I always point at the ground or a backstop. Even if I just looked down the bore and saw daylight and know it was empty. The consequences of breaking these habits will kill people.
IIRC Baldwin gets the blame here because it was his production company that made the decision not to have a properly trained person in charge of the firearms on set. If you want to use real guns in your movie then great, get a real armorer on the prop crew to manage them - otherwise use fake ones.
Theatrical Guns are if anything even more strict. There should not have been live ammo anywhere on set. The blank loaded gun chamber should have been physically shown to Baldwin before he was given it, and after it should have been given straight back to the armourer.
As an actor he's a bit negligent in not demanding this. As a union busting producer who hired a known unsafe scab hes absolutely culpable.
I'm kinda a fuckhead but gun safety is paramount. Treat every gun as if it's loaded. Never put your finger on the trigger until you are ready to fire. Never shoot unless you know what is behind your target. Baldwin broke all those rules. He can get fucked. "Tools not toys" was drilled into my head from a young age.
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Yeah wtf its a gun on a movie set. You're supposed to point it at other people and pull the trigger. I think you could have a reasonable expectation that the gun was not loaded with real bullets.
In this case Baldwin's production company cheaped out on having an experienced (and unionized) armorer be in charge of the guns and got some producer's faildaughter to do it instead. Nepotism directly caused the accident, and blame in this case might correctly float to the person in charge.
All gun safety rules are built with redundancy so that this doesn't happen even if a rule gets broken. You have to break at least two or three rules to actually hurt someone. Like, someone might fuck up at some point and flag someone with their muzzle, but as long as their finger is off the trigger, the gun isn't going to fire and nobody is going to get hurt.
One of the rules for an environment like a movie set -- the most important one, and by far the easiest to follow -- is that live ammo shouldn't be anywhere near the set at all. It isn't a unique one either, since similar rules are followed with many people's firearm storage and maintenance practices -- you keep your guns separate from your ammo unless you need to have both of them. Another one is that multiple people are supposed to verify what, if anything, is loaded into the gun, before handing it off to the actor. The actor is also supposed to follow the normal rules of firearm safety to the greatest extent that is possible for the scene. Everyone who was responsible for safety here failed at all of their jobs simultaneously, which allowed this to happen.
I'd side with you if it was on camera/during a scene but this was him fucking around with an unknowingly loaded gun between scenes. When I clean my guns and do a dry fire I always point at the ground or a backstop. Even if I just looked down the bore and saw daylight and know it was empty. The consequences of breaking these habits will kill people.
IIRC Baldwin gets the blame here because it was his production company that made the decision not to have a properly trained person in charge of the firearms on set. If you want to use real guns in your movie then great, get a real armorer on the prop crew to manage them - otherwise use fake ones.
Im pretty sure it was a squib load, same thing that killed Brandon Lee.
In fairness, if you work with even cap guns in theatre you are getting a lesson or two on gun safety from the prop guy.
Theatrical Guns are if anything even more strict. There should not have been live ammo anywhere on set. The blank loaded gun chamber should have been physically shown to Baldwin before he was given it, and after it should have been given straight back to the armourer.
As an actor he's a bit negligent in not demanding this. As a union busting producer who hired a known unsafe scab hes absolutely culpable.
I agree on all points.