Thank you for this. Taking out the "or" options which do not apply: "Involuntary manslaughter is manslaughter committed in ... a lawful act which might produce death ... without due caution and circumspection." I am not a @gator_lawyer but I can't be too far from an average juror. That case is pretty cut and dry.
I'm not sure how the brakes analogy doesn't work unless you "floor it" at a "crowd of people." A car pointed in the direction of any one person, driven at a fairly typical speed, has something on the order of 100 thousand times more kinetic energy than a bullet. It's an extraordinarily deadly piece of machinery with myriad components that can malfunction and cause a crash at any given moment. Yet we still rely on experts to tell us our cars are in good working order. Heck, we usually don't even rely on that, and instead simply expect that the people who designed and manufactured the car did so in a manner that minimizes the risk of malfunction as much as possible (which unfortunately isn't always a correct assumption . . . hello Toyota sticky pedals). Could you do your own checks every time? Sure. That would be the safest thing you could do. Are you "willfully disregarding" safety if you don't? Hardly. For Baldwin, he didn't point the gun at a random person on set and pull the trigger for shits. He pointed it at a camera while rehearsing a scene, practicing the same motion he was about to film. That's an expected part of film production. Should film sets have better safety protocols that require actors to personally triple-check a firearm the coldness of a firearm before using it? I'd buy an argument on that. However, it definitively was not industry practice at the time this accident occurred. Instead, the protocol was for two experts to double-check the gun and declare it cold, which is what happened. That's not ignoring the safety of others, it's trusting the safety of a process that had historically worked, but maybe needs re-thinking on an industry-wide level. Now, had a gun on this set actually been shot off twice after it had been checked and declared "cold," the calculus changes. I haven't read that, but if it happened, those events would certainly make Baldwin's reliance on protocol much less reasonable, particularly given his role as a producer.
Being charged with a crime doesn't mean you're guilty. It means you've been accused. Although, as I said, I think Baldwin has some responsibility here, particularly as the film producer. It just doesn't rise to the level of criminal manslaughter in my view, based on the instructions for that crime in NM.
Except there are actors pointing guns at other actors or at the camera and pretending to shoot someone in half the movies and TVs shows I watch. It seems like a disconnect from reality to say something like that should never happen on a movie set.
I think it's also worth pointing out that the actor that fired that gun that killed Brandon Lee was never charged with any crime. Like Baldwin, it was a prop gun that had been cleared to be safe by the "experts" on the set, but the gun in Lee's case had a real bullet lodged in the barrel and the blank fired the bullet out of the barrel. I think the armorer in the Baldwin case was more incompetent, because she loaded a real bullet into the gun, apparently, where as the Lee situation was more of a freak occurrence. But I don't remember anyone saying "you pulled the trigger, so it's your fault" in the Lee case ...
It is EVERYONE's responsibility to ensure a firearm is not loaded. I would also humbly submit that putting a person behind a camera, which you would point a weapon at, and fire a round, blank or otherwise, is highly negligent. Rules for Firearms 1)Treat every firearm as if it is loaded 2)Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to fire 3)Never point a firearm at anything you are not willing to kill or destroy 4)Know what is beyond your target I'd bet Baldwin broke all four of those rules, thus was negligent in his weapon handling, and this resulted in the death of a human being.
And if the best way the movie industry can think of to get those shots is to have actors point actual functional guns at people and pull the trigger, they’re all idiots. It’s not that hard to manipulate camera angles to make it look like someone is shooting in a given direction without actually pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger, and I’m struggling to come up with any reason other than shear laziness why a real, working gun is needed for nearly any of those shots. The reason for the rules of gun safety is that, even when you take lots and lots of precautions, things can still go wrong. But if you’re following the rules of gun safety, even if something does go wrong, no one dies. It’s absurd to think that our best solution here is that everyone except for actors in movies who have no familiarity with guns should follow the rules of gun safety, but that actors are fine with “someone who knows way more about guns than me told me it was unloaded.”
That's because actors are not supposed to have guns with real bullets put in their hands on movie sets. So yes, it is different than Larry and Bubba playing with real guns with real bullets ...it's completely different, in fact. There should never be an expectation by an actor that someone put a loaded deadly weapon in their hand. And I think that is the standard he should be judged by ... What is reasonable care, and standards of practice, for actors. Do you think the state can prove that actors have a duty of care to know how their pretend fake props would operate, and the safety standards to follow, if someone accidentally and unknowingly gave them the real version? Like going back to what I said earlier, should a guy pretending to fly a helicopter actually be required to know how to fly a helicopter? Should a guy playing a surgeon actually know how to do surgery? Should a gunslinger in a western be a gun expert? Of course not .. they are just acting like they know what they are doing. No reasonable person can expect Alex Baldwin to be gun expert, which is why they hire gun experts on movies.
Lol... sorry that (what you posted) was something that was going to mention yesterday, but I erased it. For some reason today when I posted the involuntary manslaughter reply to the OP it was still left in my reply box.
Also, if the actor has a duty to verify the professional gun handlers have done their jobs, wouldn't that also apply to, say, the director or other crew who tell various people to stand in places where they could conceivably be shot if a gun were improperly loaded? If the actor can't reasonably rely on 2 professionals, why is it reasonable for the director to rely on 2 professionals + an actor? And how about the people in the potential line of fire? Shouldn't they also verify that the armorer, gun handler, actor, and director all correctly identified the gun was "cold," just to be on the safe side? And, by the time all this happens, the gun has now changed hands 5+ times, which means no one can say with certainty that the gun is still in the same state as it was originally, meaning you've got to start all over again. The reality is, movies try to do dangerous things safely. To do that, you have to rely on others to do their jobs. That's true of guns and it's true of the countless other dangerous things put occurring on a film set. Sometimes accidents happen, but it's honestly pretty ridiculous to say that the film industry's gun protocols are somehow willfully dangerous, when it has a better track record than basically every other industry on the planet. I mean seriously, what other profession that handles guns on a regular basis has only seen 2 shooting deaths in the last 30+ years? I can't think of one.
bailiff hands an attorney a gun in court to be used as evidence, guns goes off, charge the attorney? what is the difference?
You’re missing my point with the “there aren’t supposed to be real bullets.” What I’m asking is why in the world is there a real gun? You know what 100% eliminates the possibility of real ammo finding it’s way on set and someone accidentally shooting someone with it? A prop gun that’s not physically capable of shooting real ammo. It’s not that hard to take the internals out of a gun so that it can’t function. Also not hard to make a gun incapable of actually being loaded with real ammo - even most commercially available blank firing adapters do so by obstructing the chamber. If you really need a gun that can fire blanks but not real bullets and that doesn’t show a chamber obstruction if you film directly down the barrel of it, get a gunsmith to make you one that’s chambered in a one-off caliber that real ammo doesn’t exist for so it’s impossible to accidentally load real ammo in it. There’s all sorts of ways to make that process notably safer than relying on “how can I be expected to know anything about guns, someone who does told me it wasn’t loaded.” And yeah, I actually would hope we’re not putting untrained actors behind the controls of real functioning helicopters and relying only on “the helicopter guy said there’s no gas in it” to make sure they don’t turn it on, take off, and crash. If we are, that seems negligent to me too. If no reasonable person should expect Alec Baldwin to know anything about guns, no reasonable person (including Alec Baldwin) should trust Alec Baldwin to have a real gun in his hands, irrespective of how many people we’re relying on to say it’s unloaded. If the attorney pointed the gun at someone and pulled the trigger? I’m not opposed to charges there. Especially so if people have already managed to fire supposedly unloaded guns the same bailiff gave them in that same courtroom twice in the past three weeks.
@GatorBen Everything you wrote in your post are questions and concerns that I'd expect a professional armorer to address, not an actor... It's not an actor's job to create safe props ...
If an actor is driving a car while filming a scene and loses control of the car and kills someone, is he responsible?
If the set design crew from The Green Mile had accidentally and unknowingly built a real, working, electric chair, do you think Tom Hanks would responsible for the death of Michael Duncan for strapping him in?
I would think he would be an accessory to the crime for strapping him in, if he flipped the switch he should be charged. They are professional actors making millions of dollars, they should be held to the highest standards.
Then we’re holding actors to a different standard than we are anyone else who may do the same thing. If any random idiot walks off the street into a gun store, asks to see a gun behind the counter, and proceeds to point it at the owner and pull the trigger, “I would expect the gun store owner to be responsible for making sure there isn’t ammo in a gun for sale, not some random idiot” isn’t a particularly good defense - even if the owner expressly told him it was unloaded. The underlying principle here is as simple as “guns are dangerous, you don’t point them at people and pull the trigger.” If we can’t expect actors to follow something that basic, we shouldn’t put guns in their hands. About the only departure from that I think would excuse an actor from the idea that pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger is negligent would be if they were expressly told to, at that very time, point the gun at someone and pull the trigger. Baldwin almost certainly wasn’t - his own statement was that he was “practicing cross-drawing,” meaning that he was effectively playing with a gun during the time while the director and cinematographer were lining up camera angles for the next shot.
