According to the AP, Jeffery Wright was actually using a gun on the set of “Westworld”, when he heard about the Hutchins shooting. They quoted him saying that he’s never been handed a prop gun without an armorer first showing him a open chamber, and shining a flashlight down the barrel to confirm it was clear.
My understanding is that it’s routine procedure for anyone carrying to hand over their personal firearm and ammunition to the armorer before going on the set.
No one should be allowed to bring one on the job in such situations.
Furthermore, the Colt SAA shoots .45 Colt Long, which is not compatible with many other weapons (mainly other ‘classic’ SA revolvers and a couple of lever action western rifles). It won’t even work in a Colt M1911 .45 automatic, which uses .45 ACP cartridges.
So any live ammo brought on set was almost certainly brought in for the express purpose of shooting it through the prop guns. This wasn’t a spur of the moment drunken decision.
New information. I’ll let those more knowledgeable than I conclude what they will.
The assistant director on “Rust” who handed Alec Baldwin the gun that fired the fatal shot acknowledged to investigators that he did not check all the rounds loaded in the weapon prior to the lethal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, a detective wrote in a search warrant affidavit made public Wednesday.
Detective Alexandria Hancock described her interviews with first assistant director David Halls and armorer Hannah Gutierrez.
“David advised when Hannah showed him the firearm before continuing rehearsal, he could only remember seeing three rounds. He advised he should have checked all of them but didn’t, and couldn’t recall if she spun the drum," the affidavit said.
An earlier affidavit stated Halls shouted “cold gun” (meaning the gun did not have a blank or a live round that contained gunpowder that could explode), before handing it to Baldwin.
Investigators added the request to search the van after interviewing several members of the movie crew, including Gutierrez, who told investigators the weapons used in filming were stored in a safe inside the van or “prop truck” to which only a few people had access and the combination.
…
Santa Fe Sheriff Adan Mendoza said Wednesday a suspected live round killed Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza. Yet in the warrant, Hancock says Gutierrez told investigators, “No live ammo is ever kept on set.”
“David advised the incident was not a deliberate act,” the detective wrote of the interview with Halls.
More context: According to the affidavit, a van used to store weapons and props on the Santa Fe set of “Rust” was searched for evidence prompted by interviews from the film crew. The van was searched for firearms, ammunition, a gun safe, fingerprints, bodily fluids, and residue, the detective said.
“Hannah advised on the day of the incident, she checked the ‘dummies’ and ensured they were no ‘hot’ rounds,” the warrant states about the ammo used on set. While the firearms were secured inside the van, “ammo was left on a cart on the set, not secured,” Gutierrez told investigators.
The grey, two-tier cart also contained a western-style belt and other prop-ammunition.
Gutierrez told investigators she handed the gun to Baldwin a couple of times during the day’s filming, and also handed it to Halls.
More in this article.
That’s a good observation.
Depends on who you ask. In the Army, perhaps. In the Navy, at least the Navy I served in? No. I don’t say that flippantly: I know the Army had a different procedure when I was in Iraq, and I know the Navy had a different procedure (more like the Army one) back in the day, and that procedure did in fact include pointing the weapon in a “safe” direction (whatever that is–and, yes, I am aware that clearing barrels are a thing) and pulling the trigger to “prove” no rounds.
The thing is, if you did the safety check properly up to that point, a trigger pull is unnecessary. If you didn’t do the safety check properly, congratulations, you just had a negligent discharge, and you also probably shouldn’t be trusted with a firearm.
Now, for those who may be wondering, “But isn’t it best, if someone who shouldn’t have a firearm, but actually does have a firearm and has a live round in the chamber, that they have their negligent discharge in a safe direction?”
Well, again, what really is a safe direction when discharging a firearm? If there’s a clearing barrel, great, but what if there isn’t? Where do you point and shoot to where there is zero possibility of someone being out of sight within the range of the weapon? Maybe there is someone downrange obscured by grass or cover. Or maybe the kind of idiot that can’t safely clear a weapon is the kind of idiot who doesn’t make sure they are really pointing in a safe direction. Maybe they meant to be pointing down at the ground but are actually pointing at their own or someone else’s foot. Because, again, if an idiot can’t clear a weapon properly…
Also, based on personal experience, I would say that it is a bad idea to have “pull trigger” be part of the routine/mechanical process of clearing a weapon. Because when people are tired–such as they may be after a long day in the desert–they can get confused. They might not so much be an “idiot” as they might just be someone who is at the end of a very long day and exhausted. I personally have been in the situation where I took a step out of order (racked back the slide on the M9), realized I had taken the step out of order, but was so used to the mechanics of clearing the weapon routinely that before my higher brain function could communicate to the rest of me that there was a need to stop and remove the magazine, I had already let the slide go forward (chambering a round) and only then removed the magazine. Had the next step in the process been “push forward safety and fire” it’s just possible that I might have discharged that firearm even knowing that I was doing something wrong as I was doing it.
Even genuinely conscientious people educated in the use of firearms can make a mistake working long hours on little sleep. They might even realize they’re making a mistake as they’re making it, and yet not be able to pump the brakes fast enough to stop from doing something really stupid like discharge a firearm when they didn’t mean to. The kind of person who thinks “I can’t make a mistake, I’m too smart” is just the kind of idiot who shouldn’t be trusted with a firearm ever.
The process to verify a weapon safe is simple and mechanical, done almost without thought as a matter of routine. I don’t ever want pulling the trigger on a weapon to be something that is done without thought, as a matter of routine. So, that’s one vote for “don’t pull the trigger to prove the gun is safe.”
Fully agree with this.
If you need that final check or rely on live ammo not getting on site, your actual safety procedure is fucked from the get go.
Not to say the final check isnt good, but it shouldn’t be something to rely on.
The entire point of proper firearms safety is you don’t rely on any ONE step.
No disagreement from me
I’ll just summarize my wall of text as this:
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The best way to have a negligent discharge is to include “pull the trigger” as part of the safety check.
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If I can’t trust you to do the safety check preceding the trigger pull correctly, then I don’t see how I can trust you to ensure the gun is pointed in a “safe direction” (whatever that is) when it does go off.
I’ll grant that where a movie might actually include “point the gun at a person and pull trigger for the next scene” as a step, the calculus may change. Still…
If the actor’s safety procedure was “Point the gun at the foot of the person who handed it to them and pull the trigger”, I bet the gun handlers would always make sure the gun was safe before giving it to the actor.
You know, that’s probably fair. I’m still stuck in the “of course I’d never point a gun at someone and intentionally pull the trigger if I didn’t intend to straight up kill them” mindset. It’s hard to shake. So, maybe, for films the trigger pull makes sense. But only because of the uniqueness of the situation.
Here’s the latest warrant:
I get the clear impression from it that Gutierrez and Halls are both lying through their teeth.
I get the impression at least one and likely both were careless about the safety checks and are now trying to cover their asses.
For safety verification, I agree. However, after field-stripping, cleaning, and reassembling a weapon, the Army had us perform function checks on the firearm to ensure it was reassembled correctly and functioning properly. We worked with 1911s, M-16s, M-240C machineguns, and M-2 heavy machineguns, and we would cycle them and dry-fire them (no cartridge of any type involved, but possibly present).
Additionally (but not particularly relevant to this incident) putting certain weapons systems into operation requires ensuring certain settings are correct; notably the Head-Space & Timing of the M-2 “Ma Deuce” heavy machinegun. In which it will be dry fired (not loaded, but often in the presence of live rounds) multiple times during the “Set Head-Space & Timing” operation.
The safety procedure of firing into the ground is there to make sure blanks aren’t confused with dummy rounds, for which it’s a sufficiently safe procedure. Live rounds aren’t really contemplated because they should have already been weeded out by the multiple redundant safety procedures before getting to that point.
Wait, you can fire blanks multiple times? Both to check beforehand and to be used in the scene?
Maybe on a movie set but in normal gun safety, no, it’s to make sure there’s no round in the chamber. There should not be a round of any kind in the chamber.
I think the idea is that if the scene calls for dummy rounds, the goal would be to ensure there are no blanks in the gun. But then that does highlight another difficulty with movie sets that even those experienced with firearms would not likely have to face: they might have to exercise different safety procedures for different rounds, perhaps even perform a couple different procedures, unless in each instance the weapon is first verified clear and safe in front of whoever else needs to verify, and then rounds (each verified in turn as the correct type–dummy or blank) inserted in front of them. Otherwise–if the rounds aren’t inserted in front of them–while you could perhaps cycle through with a trigger pull on each round to make sure it’s a dummy (easy enough to do on a revolver, I suppose, but not so much with a magazine), in other situations, such as if blanks are loaded or you have multiple rounds in a magazine, a trigger pull won’t do. Either because it would discharge the blanks that you don’t mean to discharge, or because it would only test the first round in the magazine.
So the more I think about it, the more leaving a weapon on a cart seems like a terrible idea (and that’s even discounting the risk that the weapon is unsecured). If for no better reason than that the only way the person picking it up can really be sure the proper load is in there (dummy or blanks as called for by the scene, but absolutely no real ammunition) without doing something unsafe like firing off a gun in an unknown condition is to unchamber each round and visually inspect. Which kind of defeats the purpose of having the armorer pre-load it.
The more I think about this, the more I think the armorer here didn’t think things through and became a single point of failure.