If it can’t fire a projectile, it’s not a firearm, so no, I don’t think the pointing offence would apply.
I worked in engineering for one of the biggest public corporations in the world. We had idiot executives making bad decisions. I could go on for hours about the dysfunction.
However, in all those years I never saw anyone override the decisions of the QA manager. I myself never got any sort of pushback on safety issues, We delayed releases of product many times because of a late-discovered safety issue or a critical bug in software.
I’m sure executive overrides of safety concerns happen sometimes in some companies. I’m equally sure that they don’t ‘always’ get in the way of engineering - at least when it comes to safety. They cwrtainly ‘get in the way’ when it comes to funding, schedules, features, and all kinds of other things, but that’s their job. They are, after all, managers. They have a fiduciary responsibility to use the company’s money wisely.
But that doesn’t extend to cutting corners on safety against the advice of the engineers. Usually it takes governments to do that, because the people in government are more protected from personal liability. Hence NASA management overruling engineers and launching Challenger anyway, or the Obama administration giving themselves a waiver on security testing for the Obamacare portal. If a private company did either of those things, heads would have rolled. Executives take that stuff very seriously, because they have to sign off on it and will be held responsible if their overruling safety comes to light.
In my experience, when major safety snafus happen, it’s almost always because of either process breakdown or a screwup by a very low level person afraid to say something or being sloppy or negligent. Managers sometimes create toxic environments that encourages people to make these bad decisions, but rarely will they personally force a release of a product against the objections of the quality or safety teams. In my career, I never saw it happen. Not once,
That’s an overstatement of the law. Under the doctrine of Respondeat Superior, a boss is liable for the conduct of their employee when acting within the scope of employment.
That’s a separate theory of liability from Direct Liability, which would apply if you hired somebody who you knew (or should have known) was not fit for the job.
Respondeat Superior is a much easier theory to recover under.
ETA: In this case, expect lawsuits to include the production companies as defendants, under this theory.
Honestly, I have no way of knowing what they’re using. I’d suspect a combination of non-functional props at the very least, and definitely they had some CGI work on the show in regards to weapons, but I have no idea what all they’d be using.
Hey, if they can do a show entirely with non-functional props so be it. Although at least some of them could be cocked with a mechanism imitating that of a functional gun. That doesn’t man anything else on the prop was functional. I recall at least one scene of someone loading bullets into the cylinder of a revolver, presumably dummy rounds of some sort, but again, for all I know just the cylinder was functional on that prop. Or maybe they used something else gun-like.
I am not familiar with Canadian law in this regard, or the details of Canadian film and TV production.
A lot of American n (and Canadian, of course) shows and movies are shot in Canada, especially Toronto and Vancouver. If firearms were banned by law on set, I would suspect that that would be a common topic of conversation among people in the American entertainment business. It would be quite notable, I should think, that if you had taken a job on a production shooting (ahem) in Canada, that the rules for depicting firearm use were very different.
I wonder whether our showbiz folks hereabouts are aware of this type of thing.
Real firearms are allowed on set in Canada, but live ammunition is not. It’s not allowed on set in America either, but that’s by convention. In Canada, it’s actually illegal and a felony to have live ammunition on a movie set. For that matter, it’s illegal to have ammunition stored with a gun even in your home. A gun just to be stored in a locked case, with ammunition in a separate locked case away from the gun.
I suspect movie productions have to get a permit to have restricted weapons on set, and then transfer permits to move the guns from their normal location to the set and back.
But real guns are used on Canadian sets all the time.
There are plenty of non-functional replica guns that have working cylinders and other features. But what isn’t easily faked or CGI’d are things like slide blowback when the gun is fired, Shells being ejected from the gun, etc.
There are a lot of productions that use fake guns and CGI the mizzle flash. Usually, though, it looks terrible. For example, the flash should also light up the wcenery around it, the face of the shooter, etc. CGI muzzle flashes generally don’t do that. Ejected rounds from an automatic hit things and bounce off them. With a machine gun, the bolt has to fly forward and back repeatedly while spitting out rounds, in sync with the actor’s motions.
The easiest solution to all this is just to use real guns. Again, as on-set risks go, guns are really low on the list. Sets are places full of hastily rigged heavy objects, electrical cables strewn on the floor, sets of questionably structural integrity, cranes moving around, etc. There are a lot of movie accidents, and they almost never involve guns.
This is a perfect example of a rare yet spectacular accident involving a celebrity that gets lots of news and theregore lots of demands to ‘do something’ about the problem. In the meantime, much riskier activity on set is ignored.
I give you … Boeing:
But – aside from “if it doesn’t happen where I work, then it doesn’t happen” anecdotal logic, you’re also limiting the conversation to “bean counters don’t overrule engineers --” far more narrow than my position.
My position – tied into this Baldwin shooting story – is that implicit or explicit pressure from the top can dramatically impact the way that underlings do/don’t do their jobs.
Because they generally want to keep their jobs. That fear can very effectively steer them in the desired direction. I have an old saying: you don’t get away with doing that which the organization doesn’t support.
In a case like this New Mexico story, it doesn’t mean that the armorer and the AD are beyond culpability. Their roles must be examined in painstaking detail.
It more specifically means that sometimes the total performance of the system, and the actions of senior managers writ large, play a controlling role.
Plus safety regulations and procedures are designed so that it takes multiple failures for anything bad to happen. The United States Chemical and Safety Board (USCSB) has a YouTube channel about fatal and injurious incidents. I won’t call them accidents because there is almost always a chain of people failing to do what they were supposed to, or doing something stupid.
It sound like that’s what was going on on this set.
I’m under the impression that people who quit because of safety concerns feel their life is worth more than a paycheck.
This clip has an Ian McCollum interview from 2018 with the head of a company in Toronto that handles guns for film and TV and training, most of them either custom-made or real weapons modified/disabled so they are only blank firing – especially so there’s realistic flash and the action cycles and spent cases are ejected. They bring up that the blank charge on a film gun may be tweaked for greater or lesser flash and can even have more charge than a “regular” blank; explaining also that when they work on a set their briefing includes a demonstration that the blanks are dangerous, and that except for the person actually doing any firing in the shot, the background characters will be given a nonfunctional prop. At the end they do a a couple of demo shots using the different blank modifications.
Safety was not the major reason they quit.
The major reasons were that:
a) Before filming started they had been promised that they would be provided with hotel rooms in Santa Fe, but the production repeatedly refused to provide them. Instead they were expected to drive from Albuquerque, an hour each way to and from the set, as well as working 13-14 hour days.
b) They hadn’t been paid. They were supposed to be paid each week, but they’d received no payments at all.
They had also complained about gun safety after three accidental discharges on set, and nothing had been done about it. However, it’s not clear that they would have quit over safety alone, if the other issues had been addressed.
Yes, they actually valued the paycheck, that is why they quit.
Well, no, because the topic here is a workplace accident.
I don’t understand that statement; is the sherriff saying that there should have been live rounds on set? Because Guiterrez-Reed only said that there shouldn’t have been live ammo; obviously there was, and she said she didn’t know how it got there.
Any predictions when the DA will file charges? I think David Halls and Hannah Gutierrez-Reed are in serious trouble. I expect indictments within a few weeks.
The Civil lawsuits will be more complex. The production company and anyone involved will be in court for years.
There is no rush and it’s a complicated case, so I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s over a month or more from right now. Sometimes there are circumstances that compels a prosecutor to act quickly, but this case doesn’t involve anything too extreme like a dangerous criminal who is also a flight risk or etc. The prosecutor will want to have all her I’s dotted and T’s crossed, have a full understanding of the sequence of events, and a full game plan for how she can demonstrate those events match the elements of whatever the charged crime ends up being.
I think it is still unclear–the replicas could be genuine true replicas, meaning they have all the same potential safety issues and feature problems of period guns. The only major difference is better metallurgy and better manufacturing equipment means the tolerances and finish of the guns will probably be higher quality than late 19th century manufacture.
Looking on Pietta’s website, they manufacture both true to form replicas (which would have the same dangers of period Colts) and they manufacture “transfer bar” versions, which would be much safer, and hopefully is what a movie would use. As has been mentioned: period Colt Single Action will have a firing pin on the hammer, at rest the pin rests on the cartridge primer (if there is a cartridge in the cylinder.) To fire, you cock the hammer, pull the trigger, hammer slams forward, firing pin slams into the primer, cartridge detonates. In a transfer bar revolver, at rest the pin doesn’t touch the primer, and when the trigger is pressed a small metal “transfer bar” moves into position, so that when the hammer slams down, it hits the transfer bar, force is transferred through the bar, which then has the firing pin that hits the primer in the cartridge that detonates. Since the mechanism of the transfer bar is linked to a trigger pull, even if you drop the gun very roughly and the hammer is hit, the hammer cannot impart momentum onto the primer, since the transfer bar at rest doesn’t sit in firing position so the hammer and firing pin and primer have no direct physical connection.
The various permutations of the 1870s-1890s Colt .45 revolver weren’t dangerous because of “looseness” in the gun, but because of how the gun was actually designed. Specifically:
- The firing pin is on the hammer, which at rest the pin sits on the primer of the current chamber’s cartridge
- To pop out the cylinder (to check if it’s loaded, or just to spin it around for funzies), requires partially cocking the hammer
- When the hammer is fully cocked, it only takes around 1/8th of a full trigger pull to fire the gun, while not quite the same thing as what is usually meant by the term “hair trigger” (in real gun nerd terms hair triggers usually refer to a full trigger pull that requires very light force), in common parlance this creates a “hair trigger” situation.
This means in regular operation if this gun is dropped, hammer completely uncocked, and the hammer strikes the ground, there is a chance enough force imparts through the hammer, into the firing pin, into the primer, to cause a round to discharge.
This also means that anytime you’re messing with the hammer there is a chance some sequence of events could lead to the hammer hitting the primer with enough force to cause a discharge. Keep in mind that to “decock” such a revolver you have to hold the hammer back, depress the trigger, then ease the hammer back into uncocked position. The proper way to do this is with the cylinder to never have a rounder in it when you are doing that.
Well … what the contextomy stripped from that post is …
Top-down management creates the environment in which basically every element of work is performed.
Working backward from, say, certain financial goals sets up nearly every aspect of a project, a position, of a company.
I’ve used the example elsewhere of my Nurse Practitioner wife. Several years ago, her employer shortened the allotted time for a basic patient appointment from – let’s say – 25 minutes to 20 minutes.
This is turning up the pace of the treadmill … the assembly line. It’s done in order to meet certain financial targets determined by senior management.
But the cascading effects of “work faster, work harder” are manifold.
At some point the inevitable result in healthcare is, or will be, direct harm – steps are skipped, questions aren’t asked that would elicit critical information, charting is subpar, etc., etc.
This is not specific to either health care, office workers, warehouse//DC employees, or factory workers.
It can happen just as easily in film production.
As @GreenWyvern contributed:
This is tantamount to a pretty big ratcheting up of the speed of the assembly line. The likelihood of negative consequences is non-trivial, shall we say.
It’s also directly health and safety, despite not being – as I previously said – a fork lift operator at an Amazon DC in Lake Bluff, Illinois.
At some point, when the timelines are far too short, when the budgets are too small, when the top-down directives and financial targets are pretty much inherently unworkable – but them’s the marching orders – bad things tend to happen.
And there may well be direct liability/criminal conduct on the part of individuals in this NM story, but – quite practically – there may also be significant fault on the ultimate decision makers who asked too much and hoped it wouldn’t backfire.
Even if it’s not the primary reason how do you think that’s going to play out in court? Multiple people describing 3 instances of accidental gun discharges? The trial will be about someone dying as a result of a 4th gun accident. If contractual obligations are brought up it just highlights the conditions underscoring poor safety practices.
The cost benefits don’t change if you take more time with each patient. My previous doctor of 50 years was absolutely great at spending time with patients but he got paid the same whether he put in an 8 hr day or 12 hr day for the same number of patients.
The often quoted meme “time is money” is a financial fact that sounds harsh unless you ask people if they want to pay more.
I don’t think this was a pure case of a tight budget. If they couldn’t pay their workers it was fraud from the start. I’m guessing none of the producers of the film were worried about paying their bills or which of their houses they were going to live in on any given day. It was probably within their means to fulfill their contractual obligations but that involved greater risk on their investment.