I was kinda sad when I saw the sexy selfies of the armorer. Personally I’m fine with the pix and however she choose to live her private life. I was sad because I knew when I saw them they they would do nothing but screw her over; that nothing good could come of them being splashed all over the tabloids.
She can kink out and do hardcore porn for all I care (not that she is) but when you are trying to be taken seriously as a Hollywood prop armorer you might not want to have cheesecake shots all over the place.
It should be fine to make your sexual fetishes public if you want and not be hurt by it. But out society isn’t ready for that.
Regarding the armourer removing the cartridges from the gun after the incident , I would imagine there was a certain amount of “holy fuck what was in here, how did that happen, what else is in there” about it, I doubt anyone was thinking about preservation of evidence at that point.
I would think that if they did test firings, it would have to be done safely. The actor couldn’t just willy-nilly fire into the ground. There would have to be safety protocols to avoid injuries if there happened to be bullets in the gun. Likely there would need to be announcements where work stops and everyone takes cover in case a bullet comes out and ricochets or something.
Popping open the gun and checking the cylinder would take less time. This isn’t a problem in search of a solution. New protocols do not need to be made. Guns don’t need to be banned. The procedures that should be in place and enforced are simple and common sense. They just weren’t followed. There are probably lots of aspects to the armorer’s job that I don’t know but right now without additional training I could guarantee no one would get shot if I had that job. The safety aspect really isn’t that hard it just requires attention to detail.
If you have safety procedures that would prevent an incident if followed, and an incident happens because they weren’t followed, the solution isn’t to create more procedures. I am totally in agreement with you.
But doesn’t that require distinguishing a live or blank round from a dummy round? Pulling a trigger to see if the gun goes boom takes no specialized training and is something anybody on set can do to confirm for themselves that it is, indeed, a “cold gun” without having to completely take the armorer’s word for it.
The safety rules are very comprehensive and they work.
The only change that I’d recommend is required work experience as an assistant armorer. Learning on the job isn’t acceptable. There should be a requirement that someone has documented movie set experience before they get the main job.
That may already be a union rule. But it needs to be a licensing requirement. A movie set Armorer should be licensed and there should be training requirements.
I don’t know why I thought this, but I thought the filmmaking trades should surely have some kind of apprenticeship structure. They’re as technical as some of the construction trades (in some cases they even do things similar to construction), so seem like a bad match to “learn on the job without supervision”.
If the gun were empty or loaded with dummy rounds, that would be okay. But you’d have to find a safe place to risk a discharge, which may not be anywhere on the set so 10 seconds doesn’t seem like a good estimate.
If the gun were loaded with blanks, you would have to reload the gun with new blanks. Then how do you prove those are safe? You are back at step 1.
Inspecting the rounds by opening the gun is the best way to confirm that everything in the gun is as it should be. It works for all situations, whether the gun should be empty, have dummy rounds, or blanks.
