I wonder if these rituals are event-specific, if they’re usually done before a formal rehearsal or a filming. In this case, it sounds like Baldwin was kind of practicing a move in a really informal setting, and while the ritual should 100% have been followed, it may be that it ddin’t get followed because everything else about the moment felt so informal.
If they were dropped. That didn’t happen here.
Weren’t we told that actors have to take a gun safety class? Certainly they are not experts after the class but, presumably, they learn enough to assess if a weapon is loaded.
Sometimes it’s business, it’s not personal.
I read the statute before I commented earlier. I find it highly unlikely that Baldwin will face a criminal charge. He had no reason to think he was performing a dangerous act given the information we currently have.
They can also fire pretty easily from slipping the hammer on a draw. Note that if I’m making a guess I’m assuming / hoping they aren’t using actual Colt .45s from the 19th century on a movie set, due to the safety issues.
I wouldn’t be shocked to learn they’re using actual colt .45s or similar period designs, albeit modern reproductions. Which might make the slipping hammer issue you are mentioning less likely (or not? depending upon the extent to which it was a quality control problem in the 19th century, a flaw in the design that is correctable with a slightly better design, or just inherent in that type of very simple mechanism), but I think it important to keep in mind as much of the reporting refers to this as a “prop gun.” I’m fairly confident, just based on what happened and some of the more nuanced reporting, that this was a “prop gun” only to the extent it was an actual gun that was at the time being employed as a prop on a movie set, and not some purpose-made “prop gun” designed to, say, only fire blanks.
Now, as an aside, it seems perfectly feasible that someone might design–perhaps already has designed–a true “prop gun” that can receive blank ammunition and so provide all the positive benefits of muzzle flash, recoil, sound, and overall appearance as a real gun, but that is specially chambered to not receive standard ammunition and also has its muzzle adjusted so as to be incapable of projectile discharge at least once or twice as a final failsafe. But whether or not such a thing exists (and exists for the specific type of period firearms they would have needed for a western), it may be that the expense of producing them is deemed “not worth it” (it’d be a very limited market, after all), or that if they are indeed produced in some quantity, they may yet be too expensive for the sort of low-ish budget film that a hires a g-damn 24-year-old as head armorer and won’t even spring for a half-decent chain motel in Santa Fe (there are many to choose from–it’s not like Santa Fe is the middle of nowhere: it’s the state capital!).
So I was wondering about this (to me as a non-lawyer that seems like an awfully loose set of requirements to find someone criminally liable for a death). Wouldn’t the act of using a actual gun in a movie (along we tons of other stunts and such required to make a film) count as dangerous? And the fact there were pretty well established protocols, for establishing a gun is safe, he didn’t follow means he wasn’t acting with due caution (presumably because he wasn’t asked to follow them by the people in charge of the guns, but does that matter?)
It appears using actual guns in movies isn’t unusual. While it was stated early on that most prop guns can’t even load real ammo, it later seems like that isn’t really true. While there are many prop guns that are chambered in a weird caliber like 8mm where you can’t easily get ammo that would fit it, it also sounds like it isn’t unusual to use actual firearms as prop guns.
“Prop” gun just means it’s a prop in the movie, it doesn’t apparently tell us anything specific about the gun’s mechanism or how it functions, it appears that varies from set to set.
Handling an unloaded weapon is not dangerous unless you hit someone over the head with it. It’s just a piece of metal. He believed it was not loaded. It is not clear at all that he wasn’t following protocols. The person in charge of the weapon told him it was cold. Just like every other time he’s been handed an unloaded gun. Could he have gone further? Probably. But that doesn’t matter. He would have to know he was performing a dangerous act which he did not. The negligence came from others.
Baldwin did follow protocols. It was the AD and armorer who didn’t. Baldwin had a right to ask that he be shown that the gun was safe, but not an obligation .
In this case, since he was pointing the gun at the camera, he would have expected it to contain dummy rounds, so that it would look correct on screen. The fact that there were rounds in the revolver was expected. He could have asked for proof that they were dummy rounds, but that would normally be unnecessary, since live rounds are not allowed on the set at all.
He was handed the gun with the clear statement that it was a ‘cold gun’, meaning that it didn’t even have blanks in.
The camera operator present at the incident didn’t blame Baldwin:
When asked how Baldwin handled the firearm, Russell told investigators the actor “had been very careful” and recalled an earlier instance when Baldwin “made sure it was safe and that a child wasn’t near him when they were discharging a firearm during that scene.”
In fact, nobody on the set and no movie professionals commenting on the incident are blaming Baldwin.
And this is what I think negligence will come down to: was he reasonable to believe it was unloaded? Did he have a duty to those on set, in handling the firearm, to verify it was unloaded? Might the fact that the victims here may have implicitly consented to him receiving the gun without personally verifying it was empty—whether or not there was some written rule that he should do so—be sufficient to establish that he was thus relieved of the duty to personally verify with respect to them?
FWIW, IANAL, but I think the best case for negligence (and by extent some form of homicide) is likely to be against the armored, the AD, and whoever put a real bullet in that gun. Maybe also producers (and I mean the actual decision makers) if they were negligent in setting the stage for this by hiring someone who was, say, grossly unqualified as armorer and who they should have known was unqualified, or an AD with a known propensity to disregard safety measures.
Unfortunately, the business of the New York Post, like the business of its sister company Fox News, is not reporting the news but attacking liberals. Since nobody yet knows the full sequence of events, or who was in charge on that particular set, or who was in overall charge of the movie, or any of the other details that this thread has shown is not yet knowable, the opinion of any outsider, even if a lawyer, is not meaningful. That the New York Post can find some lawyers who say that Baldwin is at risk is trivially easy. It is exactly what they do.
Will the risk turn out to be correct in actual real-world law? Who knows?
My concern is that when news organizations lie and slant about every single subject, the lies and slanted reports permeate our culture and poison it beyond survivial.
Well now that is the million dollar question. Did Baldwin have an obligation? Certainly, I think, he would have if he had just picked some gun up off the street and started playing around with it. But then that’s not what he did. He received a gun from someone who announced it was “cold” (empty). He apparently relied on that persons report. Was he reasonable to rely? Reasonable enough so as to relieve him of an obligation to verify the gun was unloaded before he started handling it around others?
But when it comes to a question of law, they are no more qualified than you or I to decide whether or not Baldwin was “negligent.” Here, that’s a legal conclusion, not a strictly factual one.
Would it be possible to construct/modify guns to avoid the possibility a repeat of this tragedy? As a non-gun person I am imagining either altering the firing mechanism it so it cannot fire even if loaded with a live round. Alternatively one could alter the chamber so that blanks could be loaded but rounds with a projectile could not - I am assuming here that blank cartridges are similar to regular cartridges but with something “missing”. Is that correct?
That’s clearly not the case or all the safety protocols that have been discussed ad naseum in this thread (and were apparently utterly missing on that movie set) wouldn’t be needed. Handling a weapon is considered dangerous.
But doesn’t not asking (when asking is part of the usual protocol followed on sets with firearms) imply “due caution” was not shown.
I mean I don’t think he’s liable for pulling the trigger (he may or may not be as a producer and owner of the production company). But the law seems super loosely written, the prosecutor doesn’t have to the show he was negligent, just that A: he was doing something dangerous. B: he did not show due caution.
As I mentioned earlier the fact he was considered a “anti-cop” celebrity (and posted stuff like that tweet above) could well factor into the decision IMO (it shouldn’t of course, but I’m guessing this is a very conservative jurisdiction and this DA’s electorate would consider it a ballot winner)
I am sure all that could be done, but then the practical difficulty is it would have to be done for every type of gun a studio might want to use in a movie. I can’t imagine there is a huge market for a hundred different kinds of realistic prop guns that can fire custom blanks but cannot discharge a projectile. So if they exist, they might actually be more expensive than real guns. Maybe there is just enough of a market in Hollywood for someone to invest in a prop gun rental agency that only deals in specially modified or custom-made prop guns, but that would have its own costs and still make it potentially more expensive than just renting a real gun from, say, an armorer (who may end up being 24 years old and not super competent). I suspect a universal requirement for studios to only use custom prop guns incapable of discharging projectiles would only likely come about through regulation or maybe a concerted effort by various guilds/unions demanding it.
You might consider that there are certain assumptions implicit in the statute about what constitutes “due caution.” Perhaps a lack of “due caution” is considered synonymous with “negligence”? “Doing something dangerous” might, likewise, speak to “foreseeability”, which is important in assessing negligence (and realizing that we aren’t actually referring to the statute, but someone’s summation of the statute for laypeople). Because negligence, as a legal construct, has its own elements, each of which is likely to have case law dealing with threshold questions in borderline cases that might be enough to take what seems a gray area to a layperson like you or me and make a pretty clear-cut dividing line to attorneys.
Apparently, yes.
A honorific, which also gives him a larger cut, should there be a profit.
I wonder how able the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s office is to deal with this kind of case, and under the spotlight. They have single digits in homicide every year, and I doubt any of them looks much like this.
Right, my baseline assumption is a court would recognize that “normal” gun safety doesn’t actually apply on movie sets–they routinely do things on set that would be negligent with a real gun. Part of what makes that “okay” is they have technical staff and professionals who are supposed to insure the prop guns are safe to use in this way. I think it would be difficult to prosecute an actor if you can show his behavior was fairly normal to other actors in the same circumstance.