Armorers are part of a safety procedure and not the end-all singular point of responsibility. They exist to facilitate proper handling of weapons. Even a gun with primed blanks can kill someone.
Gun safety is the responsibility of the person holding the gun and there is no movie exception to that fact. In legal cases ignorance is generally not considered an excuse.
As a Producer Baldwin is involved on some level in the safe operations of the movie set. As a person handling a weapon he is the last person in a chain of people who are responsible for it’s safe use.
This is a terrible idea and factually wrong.
If you are an actor and it is your job today to BE SHOT by someone in a scene, do you want to watch a professional armorer check and hand over the weapon in accord with formal safety procedures, and then watch the other actor who will point the gun at you, to verify that they follow the correct procedures and training while the professional armorer supervises?
Or do you want that other actor who will be holding the gun to be responsible for safety and just do what they think is best?
If you’re having a gun pointed at you, you should want the other actor to be responsible for safety to the same extent that you’d want another amateur jumper to open your chute pack and “double check” your parachute for safety while you’re in the aircraft together waiting to jump.
I want a professional Armorer to explain gun safety to everyone on set. And from there I expect the Armorer to demonstrate to the entire crew that the weapon is empty, how to identify the props that are going into the empty gun, and the loading of the gun in front of the whole crew.
The actor is one of many people and the last person in the chain of custody. It’s not a function of blaming everything on the actor and that won’t be the case here. This movie already had safety issues and the person who is literally holding the smoking gun is also a producer of the movie.
Yeah, I don’t think I’d feel too safe on a movie set with someone like, say Crispin Glover pointing a gun at me, with him being the only one saying it’s a cold gun.
It’s not even a question of him being the ONLY one. I don’t want him doing anything AT ALL other than following standard safety procedures and training for handling guns on set.
If the armorer hands over the prop gun, going through the whole formal procedure of demonstrating that it is safe to everyone on set, I don’t want Glover messing with that gun beyond the established requirements of the scene.
If Glover subsequently thinks there’s an issue, and he calls over the armorer to double check something - great. But if Glover starts messing with the gun himself, opening it and looking at the bullets or something without the armorer’s supervision, I have no idea what he’s doing. I’m walking off the set and calling my union rep.
Should the pyrotechnics guys also do presentations for the entire crew? And the guys setting up anything on harnesses or rigging? Heck professional cameras can weigh 200 pounds, so is there going to be a demonstration that those tripods are set up correctly?
More to the point, is the actor in the scene responsible for checking all of these things?
Now Gary Busey? Him I’d trust.
But from a legal point of view a clear argument is needed.
If Baldwin is responsible as Producer, then the other producers should also be charged, unless it can be shown that he had unique responsibility over the armory (which seems doubtful).
If he’s responsible as actor, then there are all the issues pointed out already, with actors necessarily having to assume that much of the potentially dangerous props around them are safe.
The prosecutors cannot take two weak arguments and combine them into one strong one.
If the actors are handling pyrotechnics yes. The entire crew should receive safety training as it applies to the pyrotechnics. I’ve worked for a variety of different types of companies and they all provide training on the proper use of equipment whether someone is using it directly or not.
In this case we’re taking about the handling of a weapon that if used as demonstrated in a movie possess a direct threat to life.
Right. And the crew are then responsible for following their training. That is not remotely the same thing as being responsible for safety.
Actors handling guns are similarly responsible for following their training, i.e. following standard safety procedures. They are not responsible for safety, that is the responsibility of professionals who establish and supervise those procedures.
I thought that he was already charged. Was it dismissed?
No, actually people are responsible for acting in a safe manner. You cannot mitigate that responsibility in it’s entirety to other people. You can include them in fault and in this case that is exactly what happened. You keep arguing as if Baldwin is the sole person charged.
You are just equivocating on the meaning of the word “responsible”. Having an individual responsibility to follow the mandated safety procedures for your role is not the same thing as being responsible for safety.
This is nothing to do with who is being charged, or whether Baldwin is responsible as a producer - he may be. It’s about this fallacy which has been repeated ad nauseam in this thread:
Again, this is both factually wrong and a terrible idea.
And your answer to the rest of the rhetorical questions? If they are being put in a harness, is it on them to be trained in how to correctly set one up and then do an inspection? If I’m doing a scene where I need to stand on a table, is it on me to check the structural integrity of the table? Should there be a presentation to the entire crew on everything that is potentially unsafe if someone hasn’t done their job?
The point is, this is a unusually weak case to be brought to court. The reason for doing so, IMO, is largely wrapped up in the statement about “hollywood elites” and the prosecutors showing up on FOX.
You’re trying to introduce different elements into an argument that don’t belong.
At this point it’s not speculation as to whether Baldwin and others can be charged regarding the failure to safely handle a deadly weapon. The can and they were.
Has anyone disputed that? A charge, in itself, is meaningless. Anyone can be charged at any time regardless of the merits.
Nice attempt to “answer the question you wish you had been asked” though, instead of acknowledging that your argument doesn’t stand up when we appreciate there are numerous potentially unsafe things on a film set.
That’s not true. You’re confusing civil law with criminal law. You have to have a basis to charge someone in a criminal case.
You went so far off the rails with your what-if safety examples that you diluted any legal argument about this case. It’s about the improper use of a fire arm that killed someone. That’s the case.
You have been consistently wrong throughout this thread, despite repeated attempts to educate you on the realities of film-set safety protocols, and you continue to be wrong here.