Update: Alec Baldwin case dismissed

Not that it matters but he was the producer, and actor, but not the director. The director actually was also hit in the shoulder with the bullet.
But you're right, as the producer, the buck stops with him.

 

I wouldn't either. The difference is, he had a trained professional, specifically hired to be on the set to be responsible for the safety and well-being of everyone on that set, who failed at his job. The assistant director also failed when he called out "cold gun" - meaning it's been checked and cleared.

 

I was working off of old memory. Realized my mistake almost immediately but I have been doing construction work on my house and am exhausted.

 

Those excuses likely wouldn’t get very far in any other industry - if I hand you a gun, tell you don’t worry it’s empty, and you promptly shoot someone with it, you and I are likely both getting charged with involuntary manslaughter.

I don’t see any reason that shouldn’t also be the case here. If our position is truly that it’s unreasonable to expect actors to bear any level of responsibility for making sure they don’t shoot people, we shouldn’t trust actors to handle guns full stop.

Particularly given that this production was allegedly supposed to be operating under modified firearm safety protocols because there had supposedly already been multiple negligent discharges. If you’re working on a movie where guns that aren’t supposed to fire have fired multiple times already, I don’t know that any reasonable person assumes a gun is not going to fire this time based only on being told that it won’t.

 

There are apples to apples comparisons. There are apples to oranges comparisons. And then there is the first half of your post. C'mon man, that is just an absurd statement. Every other industry is not the film industry. Excuses? Really? It's called protocol. Thousands and thousands of films have been made with guns, massive explosions, car chases/crashes, insane stunts and more. 99.9999% of the time things go as planned because responsible professionals are on set making sure they do. Full stop.

To the second part of your post. Yes, I have recently read too that there were issues on set involving where shots were fired. That absolutely should have been cause for concern. Still, you have a paid weapons expert and the AD stating "cold gun" (meaning it has been checked and cleared), and it's not a stretch to see how this happened. And it's not a random someone just sorta kinda mentioning to the actor that all's good. It's a trained professional - in this case a really crappy one/two. Baldwin believed and trusted the armorer and AD - like he had been trusting with countless other professionals - without incident - for his 40+ years of making movies and television. It was not unreasonable to do so.

 

Are Hollywood actors trained to recognize the diff between live rounds and blanks? Are there not crew hired to handle those specifics?

 

What could possibly go wrong? Well, I guess we know now.

In light of some of the other details (Baldwin being a producer & the armorer known to be incompetent), my Qs in post 68 might be dismissed.

 

I suspect that is how this ends. No jail time. Huge civil suit.

 

I'm not super sympathetic toward Baldwin, and he should definitely be coming out of pocket in a wrongful death suit, but I don't really see how the state can prove this crime beyond a reasonable doubt. The pattern instruction in New Mexico:



Had Baldwin not waited for the gun to be declared "cold" and just randomly shot it off assuming that it didn't have a live round in it (because live rounds aren't "supposed" to be on movie sets), I could buy an involuntary manslaughter charge.

But he let two professionals check out the gun, apparently in accordance with industry practice. Expecting the pros did their jobs without triple-checking may not be the absolute safest course of action, but it's not as though he's just ignoring (or "willfully disregarding") safety.

When I get my brakes changed, I don't pull the tires off to check the mechanic's work. I assume, reasonably, that the professional did his job. If I end up running into someone because the brakes aren't working, that's not because I ignored safety, I just expected that the processes in place to make things safe did what they were supposed to do.

The best shot the state has imo is showing that Baldwin had a good reason to doubt that the armorer and safety people did their job right.

 

You don't tap on your brakes a couple times to make sure there's sufficient pressure in the lines or roll in gear to make sure the pads grip? I do. And my mechanic expects me to. It's called knowing your equipment and being responsible for the safety of you and those around you.

 

Tap on the brakes? Sure. That doesn't mean they're 100% going to work right. Just like anything else they replace in your car. Heck, the lug nuts might not even be fastened properly. Most people don't have the time, knowledge, or ability to double-check the work of mechanics.

 

Considering the vast numbers of folks who avoid/beat charges for shooting people, including completely innocent people, I’d say no, it’s not that simple.

 

You presumably also don’t point your car towards a crowd of people and floor it based on your assumption that the brakes are going to work when you try to stop because your mechanic told you they would. That’s the part of your hypothetical that is missing based on what happened here.

I don’t really buy this “actors who shoot someone are blameless because they rely on experts to make sure they don’t kill anyone” theory. He pointed a gun at someone and pulled the trigger without any need to have done so. That’s grossly negligent.

I can, I guess, buy that there may theoretically be times a movie calls for a gun to be pointed at a camera and the trigger pulled (although it seems like even that could likely be pretty easily avoided), but “practicing drawing a gun” while you aren’t actually shooting a scene is unquestionably not one of those times.

And despite Baldwin’s insistence that he didn’t pull the trigger, unless that gun was broken (which the FBI says it wasn’t), there is no scenario where it should be capable of shooting without the trigger being pulled.

The gun in question is a Single Action Army type. That’s definitely not the safest gun design imaginable, but even a true reproduction SAA without modern safety features has three hammer notches: the safety notch, half-cock, and full-cock. Baldwin’s theory is apparently that he dropped the hammer and that made it go off - but even assuming he pulled it back just short of full-cocked and dropped the hammer, both the half-cock notch and the safety notch should catch the hammer without it hitting the firing pin (unless the trigger is being pulled simultaneously, if it is, the hammer will fall). So his theory of what happened doesn’t work unless both of the first two hammer notches on the gun are broken, which the FBI lab says they are not.

If we can’t trust actors to not point guns at people and pull the trigger, we shouldn’t trust actors to handle real guns. I’m relatively certain we likely aren’t putting untrained actors behind the controls of real, functional helicopters and trusting that they won’t crash them (irrespective of whether an expert says there’s no gas in it), so it seems pretty stupid that we’re handing actors who don’t care to learn anything about gun safety real, functional guns and trusting that an expert saying “there’s no bullets” is enough to stop them from accidentally shooting someone. Doubly so if, as here, we’re doing it on a set where they have already had someone manage to accidentally fire a gun that was supposedly clear of ammo twice even before this incident happened.

 

Yep, I do.

There are lots of contexts where there are plenty of protocols in place to make sure guns are cold and unloaded, and you still don’t point a real gun at someone and pull the trigger.

Go to a gun show, there will be a cop at the door checking every gun to make sure it is unloaded, and there will be a gun expert selling at the tables whose job expressly includes making sure none of the guns on that table are loaded. And yet, if you pick up a gun on the table, point it at the guy working, and pull the trigger, that guy is going to rightly lose his mind at you. Doing that is negligent, irrespective of how many other safety protocols might be in place.

And despite all the safety precautions people take in those kinds of situations, it still occasionally happens that one of those expertly cleared guns isn’t actually clear and some idiot manages to fire it (hopefully into a wall or ceiling and not a person).