Apparently the lead armorer, or whatever it’s called, was a very young 24. Learned from her expert father. This was only her second job as lead armorer, the first one being a Nicholas Cage movie. CNN was playing a podcast she was a guest on during the Cage movie in which she expressed reservations about whether she was really ready for that sort of responsibility.
I said both these things. I am devastated to see how wrong I was.
Or….not. 
There have been reports of disgruntled crew quitting due to safety concerns. What if one of them put a live bullet in the gun just to stir up shit? Some may say that’s unthinkable, but I don’t think so. I’ve known a lot of people capable of shit like that. And don’t forget someone poisoned those Tylenol bottles 40 years ago. People do crap like this a lot.
In my army career I was involved in two incidents where live ammo was mixed with blanks. One incident I was not directly involved but I was close by. In the other incident I probably would have been killed if someone hadn’t noticed the mistake barely in time. It’s scary as hell. A movie set with few moving parts means there is no reason for that to happen.
That both makes sense and is completely insane at the same time. It sounds funny but I generally trust TMZ as a source.
Occam’s Razor, and apparently semi-reliable reports (I think of TMZ as about in the middle of the pack), suggest it was more likely several people stupidly having fun with the guns, with live ammo, during time off. Was the armorer one of those folks? That would be really bad. Even if she wasn’t, the armorer should have kept close watch over those guns, 24/7, without anyone touching them but her and (briefly) the actors, so also very bad.
Hanlon’s Razor.
Yes — even more appropriate!
i’m not sure Baldwin is off the hook. Several actors have weighed in on Twitter saying that actors who handle guns have to take annual safety training supplied by the NRA, and that the training and SAG rules say the actor has the final responsibility to make sure the gun is ‘cold’.
This is normally accomplished by the armorer showing the actor the gun with the action open, and then shining a flashlight down the barrel to show there is nothing in the barrel. If the actor is supposed to fire blanks, he is supposed to know exactly how many shots to take, and is shown the blank rounds and verifies that there are exactly as many as required, no more, no less.
If this doesn’t happen, the actor is supposed to decline the weapon, OR ensure for themselves that the weapon is safe by test-firing it at the ground if it’s supposed to be empty, or clearing the gun themselves. No one pointing a real gun is ever supposed to do so without personal positive confirmation that it’s safe.
They posted the actual SAG rules confirming this.
Apparently, this routine is so ingrained that these actors have said that in decades of using guns in movies they have never seen this prodedure skipped, and would never accept and point a real gun at anyone without this being done. It was described as a ‘ritual’ that would be shocking if it wasn’t done.
It sounds like they basically are supposed to use standard gun safety techniques, modified for movie shooting without compromising safety.
The other reason Baldwin might be liable is because there are comments from the crew to the effect that procedures were breaking down because of a rush to finish shooting because of the low budget, and that there was a bullying producer on set ordering people to do things quickly. Baldwin is a producer on the movie. That doesn’t mean it was him, but it could be and fits what we know of his temperament.
We can probably put the ‘disgruntled union guy’ theory to rest, though. It sounds like the earlier accidental discharges pre-dated the labor dispute. This is just a breakdown in safety procedures caused by a chaotic working environment and a lot of very stupid decisions…
Is loading a blank into a gun any different than loading a real bullet into a gun?
She probably would have learned to load guns as a kid if her dad was a legendary armorer.
Maybe she means being scared to make no mistakes that every round is, indeed, a blank. But then, no real bullet should ever be on a set and, presumably, the armorer is in charge of acquiring the blanks.
I dunno. Weird.
Except for muzzle-loaders, no.
Damn, yeah that’s some next level fucked up-ness.
Interesting (another post upthread said this as well, but you provided more detail).
Yes, this does put some blame onto Baldwin, and at least as much of not more (IMHO) on the Assistant Director who handed it to him.
(But still most of the blame is on the armorer.)
Manslaughter is for closers?
I feel that you’re making an unreasonable assumption that she wasn’t absent for a completely reasonable and defensible reason like rapid onset morning ebola.
(She got better.)
Heh. (Though, while she clearly did some awful and possibly criminal things, it may turn out her absence per se might not be one of them, if the AD, director, and perhaps Alec hurried things along that day without informing everyone of the change in schedule.)
The more I hear about what happened here, the less I think about this as a tragic accident and the more I think that people need to go to jail over this.
The armorer might not have been on set because no one told her they were shooting with real guns that day. We don’t know the circumstances that led to her not being there.
I could also see a circumstance where a bunch of macho actors simply bullied her or kept her completely in the dark about what was going on when she wasn’t around. A 24 year old female armorer just might not have comnanded the respect on set for everyone to follow her rules, especially with Hollywood egos and a rushed production being done on the cheap with a producer on set harassing everyone.
Or maybe she walked off the set in solidarity with the union people, never thinking they’d be reckless enough to keep shooting without an armorer.
But I have to say that the breakdown in procedures and accidental discharges over a period of days does not look good for her.
Really asking…
Wouldn’t the armorer be responsible for securing the guns and locking them up before she left?
Or is it normal to leave them out?