Let’s not let “perfect” get in the way of “better”. Had the potential penalties been high enough, the producers would have hired more personnel to try to ensure a safe environment. Yes, there’s always going to be asshat cheapskates, but if the higher-ups face a higher penalty, some will take safety more seriously.
Baldwin was seen yesterday clean shaven. He’s discarded his western character. Seems unlikely this film will ever be finished.
Nobody thinks drunk drivers are mustachio’d villains either, but when they decide it’s okay for them to break safety rules because surely nothing bad will happen, we still throw the full force of the law at them.
Safety regulations prevent death when they’re followed. When folks responsible for an organization let those regulations slip, and someone is injured or killed, the responsible parties should face consequences so severe that it terrifies other folks in the same position.
Right now we’ve got a culture that not only winks and nods at safety regulation violations, but that actually politicizes the regulations themselves. We gotta change that.
And after all “it will work most of the time” even if not under absolutely every imaginable extraordinary situation, is why we apply the safety measures we do apply.
I supose there could be a provision that made it so that X Y Z parameters of safety are required by law of any film/TV production in the state and if it’s failing them, persons who cause that by decision or omission would have to account both in civil and criminal modes. Although as mentioned elsewhere, we would run into the very customary “you can’t prove we TOLD them to disregard safety” and/or “it was not MY job to make that call” defense and at best everyone throwing everyone else under the bus. Plus then there would be the converse hazard, that once you technically meet parameters X, Y, Z then you can say (or even, a court says you can say) “that’s it, good enough, no need to do anything else, too bad this freak event ocurred”.
I could see states putting in legislation requiring that if firearms (or for that matter, pneumatics) capable of any type of discharge are used on film or stage, a full-time trained technician (define…) must be contracted, all firearms must be under their direct present supervision and custody, may not be used for any other purpose for the duration of the filming, and that failure to make any of that happen so IS an offense charged to whoever’s responsible by decision or omission (aggravated in case of injury or death). Throw in triple damages on the civil side while you’re at it, why not. But you’d still be at the will of producers shopping for the state with the loosest regulation – and I would not be surprised if the legislatures would waive productions below a certain budget.
The media are certainly putting a spotlight on Gutierrez-Reed’s life.
According to Dyer’s father, his son, Butcher and Gutierrez-Reed had all been drinking alcohol at a party earlier in the night. Gutierrez-Reed reportedly told law enforcement officers that she had seen both men drink four to five beers each before she allegedly gave her boyfriend [Aaron Butcher] the keys to her ride.
Butcher was apparently already on probation from a previous DUI arrest
Dyer died in the accident, while Butcher was arrested for aggravated DUI. And because he was driving his girlfriend’s bike, her insurance company reportedly paid Dyer’s parents $50,000 in exchange for an agreement to not file a lawsuit against Gutierrez-Reed.
This happened just last year. Safety-conscious, NOT.
I believe I’ve seen it reported that Guiterrez-Reed was also an assistant prop master, in addition to armorer.
Haven’t gone back to re-read the search warrant, but IIRC, it said she was outside the church by the gun cart when the incident happened, presumably for Covid-related reasons. She removed the fatal shell casing after the shooting, so clearly she was nearby when it happened.
Not necessarily.
Yes. It’s a very common cartridge for both original Colt Single Action Army revolvers and reproductions.
“Single Action Army” is a model made by many manufacturers of reproductions today. There aren’t many people who would choose to modify a century old collectible gun to fire only blanks rather than a cheaper modern copy. Pietta is one such maker of reproductions and apparently made the gun that fired the fatal round.
Under every circumstance, she should have favored doing the job that keeps people from getting killed but there is plenty of blame to go around.
This is really good speculation. But I think even just the primer would push the bullet out of the gun. Donno.
Note that I live remote. No close neighbors and have been shooting for 50 years. I recently shot a .357 into the ground to make sure that a bear wasn’t in our cars. They open the doors and get in (twice now). The noise would get the bears attention and I would at least see the car rock a little before I approached the car.
I’ve also shot into a tree stump by a bear to scare him away (he was ‘casing’ our house and would not leave, banging pots and pans would not do it.
So, aside from bullet traps, IMHO there are ways, safe ways, to discharge a firearm. Pointing it at the ground sure beats pointing it at a person.
As to her assertion that she can’t be blamed because they wouldn’t let her do her job, and she was overruled; no you can be blamed, because it’s your job. It’s your responsibility. If you’re not lying your ass off to try to salvage some kind of potential future for a career, and/or keep from being prosecuted/sued, then you should have walked like much of your fellow crew did. Because if you don’t, then it’s your ass if something goes wrong.
I’ve been in a similar position. I worked for an organization that was in a lot of disfunction. I was network administrator, which was a relatively low position in the hierarchy; nobody below me and a few people above me in the IT structure. But then things went bad; the major boss of everyone got fired, and in relation to the incident that got him fired, my boss (the CIO) got fired. The other guy who I didn’t report to but was still senior to me, the IT Manager, he got fired. Consultants were brought in and I reported to them for a brief time, but they left because the organization wasn’t paying them. In the midst of all of this insanity we had a security breach from a hacker who vandalized our network and the FBI were involved. Also, there was no backup solution in place for our servers and files; I had under the direction of my former boss been trying to get a cloud-based backup in place, but the patchwork LAN he had put in place was so decrepit that it couldn’t support the backup solutions we were trying to implement because of bad network integrity, and then the funding and support for implementing a backup solution was taken away after he was fired.
On top of all of that, we were under direct federal government oversight and I knew we were not conforming to their security standards. Technically we were a government ourselves; I drove around a GSA fleet sedan with federal plates as part of my job. If we ever got audited, say one of the many disgruntled people who were fired decided to be whistle-blowers, they’d be in big trouble.
And then we got the great news. Me and my sole remaining coworker, a person who only did desktop support, were doing such a great job keeping things running despite being cut down to 25% of the size of what we once had, that they are just going to keep things that way. So I was technically in charge of IT at that point since I was solely responsible for the servers, WAN, VPN, network, just about everything. My job title didn’t change (nor did my compensation) and I also didn’t get any additional authority. I wasn’t empowered to make any decisions about changing or improving the way we did things, I just had to keep it all running somehow.
So I walked. Within days of finding out that no new CIO or other manager was coming on board and that I was it, I got out of there. Because I knew that things were on the verge of falling apart and I had all the responsibility and none of the authority. I got out so that I wasn’t the scapegoat.
That’s what she should have done if she was just the innocent victim of tyrants on the set who wouldn’t let her do her job. And if she didn’t have the experience or wisdom to recognize the position she was in and to get out, then she didn’t have the experience or wisdom to have a job like that which literally puts the lives of others in her hands. I can’t bring myself to have much sympathy for her.
I would have definitely quit. Heck, I wouldn’t have accepted a job with that much responsibility without a very clear understanding of my position. Who do I report too?
The head of the English Department.
I’ve never tried it but the Brandon Lee shooting taught us that a primer is exactly the right amount of force to push the bullet into the barrel of a revolver but not out of it. If the bullet were pushed out of the cartridge solely by the force of a primer, two things make it likely that it’s not going to go all the way through the barrel. First, when the bullet leaves the cartridge it will travel through a little bit of the cylinder, cross the cylinder gap (the empty space between the cylinder and the barrel) and then hit a segment of the barrel called the “forcing cone.” The forcing cone is basically, as its name implies, a slightly cone shaped bit of metal that funnels the bullet into the barrel, where the bullet generally starts to drag through the lands and grooves in the barrel to start spinning (the spinning improves accuracy). But, the drag on the bullet from friction against the forcing cone and barrel is inordinately higher than the resistance the bullet meets before it hits the forcing cone. Also, once the bullet fully enters the forcing cone, the pressure from the primer will be vented through cylinder gap. So, once the bullet enters the barrel, drag is slowing it down right at the moment it loses most or all of its push from the primer. The result is that the bullet goes in but doesn’t come out.
A barrel obstructed by a bullet is tougher to catch in a Single Action Army than most modern revolvers. In most revolvers, you can swing the cylinder out by pressing one latch and look right down the barrel to see that it’s clear. The Single Action Army cylinder doesn’t come out as easily, and if you just try to look down the barrel for an obstruction, you will just see darkness.
That’s what the legal system will work out. SOMEONE had the authority to hire / fire the AD and the Armorer; SOMONE made the decision that earlier accidents and safety concerns weren’t critical, and SOMEONE had the authority to hire / fire that someone. I know that some “producers” of movies are there to add their name to the movie, some are there for financing reasons only. The one overseeing the actual operations of the project is the one that will be held accountable.
Use a stick-like object.
Long enough that you can see it poke through the gap from the side, or marked as to the full length of the barrel.
Good info Tired and Cranky.
I have a neighbor (understand that we live remote) that says he uses .22 to shoot at squirrels. He says the cartridge only has the primer, and no powder. Semi-Auto rifle. I’m a little skeptical about that.
Nice guy and knows his shit but I don’t think he is correct. Doesn’t seem right to me. I’ve shot .22 since I was 9yo. And yes I know the difference between rimfire and having a primer.
I think he is mis-informed and is just using some sort or low powered round. Donno.
And while ground squirrels are a pest around here, I really don’t approve of this.
I didn’t say it was impossible just harder. If it’s a little harder, it’s just a little more likely to be skipped. Using a stick is harder than not using a stick. You would need different graduated sticks for different barrels which is another potential source of error. Since I’ve never checked for a barrel obstruction by sticking a stick through the barrel and looking through the cylinder gap, I’m wondering whether the cylinder gap is big enough to make that easy to do under potentially dim lighting.
Not necessarily. It has to be shown that they were negligent in hiring or in practice.
If you hired a driver, and that driver subsequently drives drunk and kills someone, you are not responsible unless it can be shown that you knew the driver was a major risk and hired him anyway. Even then, I think that would be a heavy lift in court.
The reporting on this case is, as usual, terrible. We still don’t really know what happened. We have had reports that the guns were left unattended on a cart. Other reports say the armorer was standing with the the guns and actually checked the gun in question before handing it over to the AD. Some reports say that there was target shooting going on. Some even say they armorer was engaged in it. Yet other reports say the guns remained locked up at all times and she had no idea how they were accessed. Both could be true - there could have been target practice gojng on, but with personal guns that had nothing to do with the prop guns, but some of the ammo wound up with the dummies and got loaded into the gun before the scene.
Initially we heard that the AD just ‘grabbed’ a gun off of the cart and handed it to Baldwin without checking, Both the Armorer and the AD are now saying she did show the state of the gun to the AD, but he apparently wasn’t paying much attention and doesn’t recall how many cylinders she showed him.
So the scenarios run all the way from gross negligence by the armorer and AD to possibly theft of the guns by other people who shot them and put them back. Not checking the gun at all would be a violation of safety procedures and negligent. Checking it but missing a bullet in a gun where it’s easy to do that is more a matter of poor training and poor procedure, but possibly not negligence. Baldwin should have checked the gun, but if it’s not uncommon for that last check to be skipped, it may not rise to the level of negligence that’s actionable in court.
I suspect when and if this goes to trial even more details will come out that we haven’t heard yet, which may change things. Judging by the salacious articles coming out about the armorer, my guess is that she’s being thrown under the bus by the more powerful people on and behind the shoot. But maybe she totally deserves it. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between. Or maybe she did her best, was overruled at every turn, undermined, pushed aside, ignored, and ultimately a tragic mistake happened and now she’s being blamed as the sole cause. We’ll see.