Then the answer of why it is different should be easy to repeat if it had been said so many times before.
Obviously it is not under the controlled conditions of a film set with professional safety experts responsible for insuring no one is harmed.
Instead it is a random nobody giving you information you have no way of knowing the veracity of and you (the shooter) have demonstated very, very poor judgement as well as criminal negligence resulting in death.
It was most certaily defective. It had live ammunition in it. That is a deadly defect for a prop gun. Had it been a real weapon supplied to a police officer or soldier and intended to cause physical harm it would not be defective.
It seems that she missed that step. I know pronouns
can get a little confusing these days but the armorer was a she. This is not a nitpick because saying “he” implies you are referencing Baldwin or some other man.
Perhaps, but as we have seen with guns, the protocol may be different on a production set.
Being an actor is a dangerous occupation, but that’s due to after-hours activities and not on site shootings. This is a case where standard protocols were not followed: while I don’t doubt that banning real guns on set would be safer for the actors, I’m not convinced it would be appreciably safer. Because an organization that violates work rules left and right doesn’t become that much safer by adding another work rule to the list.
What we have here is an high profile industry that should be (and is) safer than the typical job, because of heightened news coverage. There are other examples of this in our society. Flying as a passenger in an airplane was incredibly safe during the 1970s. But given the rise in air traffic, the aircraft industry recognized that air crashes could become monthly events in the decades to follow (at least somewhere in the world) and that would be bad for business. So they took a safe industry and made it ridiculously safe, in terms of risk per passenger. We like it that way. Read James Fallows to learn about aviation’s rigorous safety culture, backed by stringent governmental oversight.
I don’t think prosecuting an actor for misuse of a firearm in this instance will appreciably enhance on set safety. I do think requiring movie studios to pay a fee (tax) that funds OSHA inspections and FAA-style investigations of safety incidents would improve safety. So that’s what we should do.
OSHA - Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which regulates workplaces
FAA - Federal Aviation Administration
I spent many years as an actor. I have handled firearms both on film and on stage, including hot weapons which were intended to be discharged during performance. The statement above is misleading at best and flat untrue at worst.
The actor’s job is to perform the safety steps required of him according to the process designed by the people who ARE responsible.
This has been repeated over and over and over again throughout this thread. It is beyond frustrating that it continues to be necessary to keep repeating it.
Fair enough.
Do the people who are responsible have standards they adhere to as a profession or does each person (armorer I guess) make the rules as they see fit for each production?
As has been repeatedly posted in the thread
(a) the unions have guidelines which all participants can expect to be followed (Sam posted about this just a bit above)
(b) where an actor on a union production feels unsafe because these guidelines are not being respected, they can raise a grievance (but they should absolutely not attempt to introduce their own parallel steps or safety protocols independent of the production’s rules)
but
(c) Rust was a non-union production so the options for actors to demand safety protocols in strict compliance with industry standards were limited.
The bottom line is that it was the sloppiness of the production itself that resulted in the cinematographer’s death, not the simple presence of a prop firearm on the set, and that the vast majority of this sloppiness was well upstream of Baldwin. Should he have recognized this and used his star power to demand changes? That seems obvious now, but without the benefit of hindsight, it’s a much murkier question. And in any case, his share of the responsibility is fractional compared to the people who were supposed to be in charge of the show.
Yet the authorities have skated past the people with the overwhelming share of responsibility in order to focus on the famous person. And despite all efforts to inform the discussion here, the same thing keeps repeatedly happening in the thread. Makes me want to tear out what remains of my hair.
In this actual case, it was two "he"s. Baldwin and the assistant director guy. The armorer (she) was not on set due to COVID restrictions.
So, why were they using a gun without the armorer? Who made THAT decision?
Right that’s because i am referencing Baldwin. If one of the safety protocols is that he’s not supposed to use a gun until the armorer has demonstrated to him that it’s safe, then he, Baldwin, skipped that step.
Is Baldwin the only person being charged? I agree that seems wrong. But i also think Baldwin has fault here. As best as i can tell, the standard safety protocols require the person handling the gun to take some responsibility for its safety. Which, honestly, is what common sense would call for. No, it’s not his job to be an expert in gun safety. But he’s supposed to be sure that an actual expert has signed off on the safety.
Of course not. I also would not be innocent if I was on 5th and Broadway punching someone in the face, but Boxing still exists.
Normally, if theres someone waving a gun around pretending to be a quick draw artist, the other people in the room are thinking “WTF, this asshole is going to kill someone!” I’m guessing that wasn’t the mood in the room during this incident because they were all there to watch some asshole pretend to be a quick draw artist.
It also occurred to me that if there’s anyone who should be double checking the safety of the gun, it’s not the actor behind the gun, it’s the people the gun will be pointed at.
It’s also the fallacy (that I coined 
): The fallacy of I know a thing
That if you’ve been taught one thing, or are aware of only one fact about a subject, then it must always be critically relevant to any discussion on that subject.
Yes, in normal circumstances, if you’re handed a gun you should assume it is loaded and deadly until you have confirmed otherwise.
A film set is not normal circumstances though. Is an actor also obliged to check pyrotechnics, harnesses, rigging, electrics, etc that they will interact with? Do they need to check that a window they will throw someone out of is sugar glass?
Do they need to be an expert on all these things, because if something goes wrong it’s manslaughter on their part?
No. But they ought to check in with the expert before using those things.
I think that captures it well.
How many of those things might kill another person? How many of those things is the actor solely in control of at some point?
If the actor is in control of something that might kill others then yeah…they should be trained in the safe operation of whatever that thing is.
Let’s approach this through analogy:
Let’s say an airplane is being prepped for a trip. the guy who is responsible for ordering the gas makes a stupid math error he shouldn’t have made, but he was busy. So he orders less gas than he should have.
But that shouldn’t matter, because there is a second layer of safety: A worker is supposed to ‘dip’ the tanks and make sure there is enough fuel. But he’s a little behind the weather, so he doesn’t bother, and his supervisor skips the part where he’s supposed to check that the tanks were dipped.
That shouldn’t matter, because the pilots will check the guages. The pilots then get into the airplane, and they don’t bother checking the gauges to see if they have enough fuel as they should. They trust that the professionals earlier in the chain did their jobs. So they take off, the plane runs out of fuel and crashes.
Who is responsible? Whp should go to jail?
- the airline maintains lax standards and has a culture of poor safety and training.
- The guy who ordered the fuel made a mistake and didn’t check.
- The person who is supposed to dip the tanks to verify quantity blew off the task.
- His supervisor didn’t check that the dip was done.
- The pilots didn’t folow proper procedure.
In industries that have a safe track record despite operating in a dangerous environment, it usually takes multiple failures or even cascading failures before a tragedy occurs. There is almost never a single ‘guilty party’. And guns ARE very safe on set. There are real guns on movie and TV sets all over the place. Thousands of blanks are fired every year around people. And yet, movie set firearm accidents are very rare. That’s because there is a chain of responsibility established, and each link of the chain is supposed to re-establish safety if any other link fails.
In this case, the armorer allowed live rounds to be brought onto the set. She did not exercise positive control over the guns and keep them in her view at all times. She did not control the ammunition stored around the guns. She made many errors.
That shouldn’t have mattered, because the live round should have been caught when the gun was given to Baldwin. Two procedures failed - the requirement of the armorer to demonstrate safety to the actor, and the actor for failing to demand to see that the gun was ‘safe’.
The assistant producer went and got the gun and gave it to Baldwin, when he wasn’t the one who should have done that, and didn’t know the procedures for vverifying the gun was safe.
That shouldn’t have mattered, because Baldwin shouldn’t have been pointing the gun at someone while pulling the trigger.
And to cap it off, there was a pattern of safety violations on set, including a previous accidental discharge of a gun which luckily didn’t hurt anyone. That speaks to management’s failure to maintain safety protocols on set.
So… Who is liable? Who should be punished? It’s not simple.
Seriously? All of them.
Your harness will kill other people?