The prosecutor has said she is unaware of reports of the crew using the weapons for target practice and called the accusation “unconfirmed.”
The quotes are in a New York Times paywalled article but repeated in other articles.
That’s assuming everything went to play and the stayed on schedule. Not something I’d assume with this troubled production.
Well a lot of low budget films get all the filming done in their scheduled number of days come hell or high water, a lot of the costs of the film are associated with number of days filming. For crappy low budget movies if they run out of filming days that’s often it, there’s no more filming that can financially be done…so hopefully you can string something together in post-production to make it a workable film.
I think the reason for live ammo being on site in an given situation is not really important, you probably have to assume in your safety system that live ammo will leak on site , particularly given the prevalence of firearms in the US.
If you take the stance that live bullets could be on site and the final check on set may have variable outcomes, then you have to look at the procedures that take the gun from an unknown state in a safe or bag to safely handing over to the set and on to the actor so pre checks, clearing, identification of parts used , function checks, loading , custody/control, tagging and handover.
On top of that you need people who are trained and competent to carry out those tasks and a culture on site in which people will follow them and consequences/correction for when they don’t, even if there was no bad outcome.
As a thought test of the process, say you allow people to have live ammo on the site, are you still comfortable with your process and management integrity to deliver a safe prop to set and into the hands of the actor
Thanks–I hadn’t seen that.
Somehow live ammunition got into these guns. Are there any other plausible theories about how it got there? That seems like the million dollar question.
There’s a very small chance that some disgruntled asshole put it there on purpose. But the level of sheer stupidity combined with sociopathy required for that act seems super duper high, and I say this as someone who tends to think we have a lot of sociopathic idiots wandering around. Doing this would lead to a really high probability of getting caught, a really low probability of actually hurting someone, and an even lower probability that it would accomplish any goals of the disgruntled asshole.
The huge quantities of live ammunition on the set (and my apologies for getting confused, but this means actual real bullets, not blanks, right?) is super weird, and also needs explanation. Who brought it to the set, why, and how was it stored, and why?
I’ve read a lot of news articles with comments from other experienced armorers. Several turned down the job on Rust because the production wouldn’t agree to enough staffing.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was hired because she was young and eager to please. She was expected to run non-stop and work understaffed. She didn’t have the confidence to demand the time needed to test the guns and supervise their use.
I can easily imagine the experienced AD barking orders and reminding Hannah that time is money on a film set. We know Dave Halls (the AD) grabbed the gun off the cart and gave it to Baldwin. Apparently none of the safety checks were followed.
That doesn’t excuse what happened. Hannah screwed up and she’s in big trouble. Hannah and Halls are probably facing criminal charges.
The lesson here is the need for actual set experience. Knowing guns isn’t enough. The armorer requires leadership skills and that has to be learned from working with someone that’s experienced.
It’s the United States and guns and ammo are common?
I once moved into an apartment in Chicago and found live shells of various sorts left in closets and cabinets. Not tons of it - a shell there, a couple rounds here, but clearly from a prior resident. So I think there’s always a possibility of a live round or three wandering in from the surrounding environment. Which is also a reason for checking and re-checking because weird accidents can happen.
On the other hand, if there are boxes of live ammo on set, stored alongside blanks or dummies, that is totally uncalled for.
I agree. You need multiple steps that are each independently sufficient to keep things safe. But if there really were people putting bullets in prop guns for shits and giggles, they should have been fired.
Yeah totally, assuming this rumor is correct (and it is just a rumor as other posters have pointed out) that is the biggest red flag imaginable, not that all the other things weren’t pretty terrible but that is the one thing that should never happen. It should have led to everyone involved being sacked on the spot and the production being shutdown (I guess, I mean its such a no-no that there may not even be a protocol for what do if something unthinkable like that happens).
Of course thats moral responsibility, it doesn’t necessarily mean legal responsibility. Is there a “mandatory reporting” law for such things? Can you be legally responsible (as in go to prison, not lose a civil case) because you failed to report something unsafe?
I mean, in a lot of places they are, but there’s a lot more places (the sink at the rest stop, the counter at Bojangles, the entrance to my school, the welcome mat at my friend’s house, and on and on and on) where I’d be utterly shocked and alarmed to see a box of bullets.
A movie set where they’re using fake guns is super duper in that category, so it gets back to my question.
There are rumors and there are rumors. I have no doubt that TMZ spoke to someone on set who said it happened. TMZ is very careful to only publish the truth. The fact that someone told you something happened is not the same as being proof that it did happen. The prosecutor may not have interviewed that person yet. The prosecutor should always be cagey about the information they have and what they are looking for.
The press conference is live streaming here:
Investigators took two other prop guns as evidence. What are the odds there were live rounds in one or both of those?
I have no idea how someone gets hired as an armorer, but would hope there is a long, long apprenticeship under an master before getting hired as a journeyman. Not just for the gun-safety aspect but also what is involved in letting a gun out of your control, necessary for the shoot.
I think she’s afraid of screwing up the shot because she’s not confident that she’s knows which round is going to fire next when she loads the chamber. That’s the kind of thing an armorer should never be in doubt about for a moment. She lacked the experience for the job based on that comment alone. Given how close the statements are about her fear of loading blanks and her uncertainty about loading the chambers, I’m not certain she was saying her biggest fear was about making blanks. The thread of her conversation seemed to be about loading guns. I’m open to the possibility that I’m wrong. You should be too,
I too was taught how to handle firearms decades ago. None of that training involved convincingly appearing to point a gun at a person and appearing to shoot them. It’s a different skillset that requires different protocols and different training.
It would make some sense to remove all the cartridges, including the spent one, to make the gun safe. (Too little, too late of course.) It makes no sense to me to remove only the spent cartridge, if that’s what happened.
And, according to her interview, chambering rounds in a gun was something she “figured out” herself only recently.
Given his shock at the event and the fallability of human memory, even Alec Baldwin probably can’t reliably say whether he pulled the trigger. Had the armorer not tampered with the firearm after the discharge, we might have learned from the location of the cartridges in the cylinder whether the discharge was because the hammer was over a live round and fired on the draw (which would be unlikely unless something hit the hammer or the gun were dropped) or because the round that was supposed to be a blank was live instead.
Faithful reproductions are cheaper and probably safer than real ones but the faithful reproductions also reproduce the firing pin fixed to the hammer and the safety issue presented by carrying with the hammer over a live round.
It’s a flaw in design that has been addressed in modern single action revolvers but that has been faithfully reproduced in modern reproductions. If you want the gun to look perfectly authentic to the 19th century, you will have a hammer that has a pointy bit on the end that pokes right into the cartridge. Modern firearms of the same type have one of a couple of different mechanisms to prevent this. Sometimes it’s a shield that blocks the firing pin from hitting the primer unless the trigger is pulled. Sometimes it’s a transfer bar that relies on the hammer hitting with sufficient force to push a firing pin mounted in a spring into the cartridge.
This sounds plausible to me.
If the shot you want is the gun firing from up close, you want a blank round in the chamber that is going to fire but you want all the other chambers to have dummy rounds that look real. When you see footage of the gun from straight on, it will give you the most realistic presentation.
Using the minimum amount of powder is the recommendation of the SAG-AFTRA safety bulletin.
There is some disagreement in this thread about the meaning. In the real world, it means real ammunition. It means the same thing in the SAG-AFTRA safety bulletins that Sam Stone linked to above, which refers to blank ammunition as “blank ammunition.” Some people seem to have a quirky usage where “live round” means blank and real-live rounds don’t exist in film land. The SAG-AFTRA Safety Bulletin #1 says Live Ammunition should never be used on set. SAG-AFTRA Safety Bulletin #2 says but if you do use Live Ammunition, there are other stringent safety protocols you should follow In any event, adherence to either set of protocols would have prevented this death.
Based on what the DA just said they did in fact use a antique revolver (there seems to a lot of “No one would ever do that” in this case 
):
“It was a legit gun,” Carmack-Altwies told the paper. “It was an antique, era-appropriate gun.”
One was a plastic replica, and the other had a ‘modified cylinder’ according to the sheriff. I don’t exactly know what that means, but probably it wasn’t capable of firing live rounds.
Wouldn’t a safer, but not too time consuming protocol, be the following: let’s say there are 4 guns in a particular scene. First, the armorer shouts, “4 guns in scene!” The armorer then walks to the first actor and shouts, “cold gun!” (the armorer has presumably already verified the gun cold as they’re supposed to), then hands the gun to the actor, who must inspect the gun and also shout, “cold gun!” Same routine for the other 3 guns. If anyone on scene (perhaps a designated AD) doesn’t hear 8 “cold gun!” shouts, the entire routine must be repeated.
“We’re running late, we’re going to lose the light! C’mon! We did this 4 times already. The guns are cold. We get it. Move it before the have to do another day of location shots.”
No protocol can overcome human stupidity/carelessness/laziness.
One thing to point out, not that it changes anything liability-wise, is given everything we know about the circumstances (practicing drawing an antique weapon that it turns out was loaded with real ammunition, and possibly cocked on a hair trigger) Alec Baldwin shooting someone else was a far less likely outcome than Alec Baldwin shooting himself.