I’m wondering if, because they moved the camera and in doing so had new marks for Baldwin, they loaded it with (they thought) dummy bullets to make sure they got the shot (no pun intended) down the cylinders they wanted although it was a rehersal.
Hunter’s politics enter into it because he is just one among a giant avalanche of asshole right-wingers who have gleefully thrown aside taste and decorum as they leap for the opportunity to take cheap shots at Baldwin’s history of anger issues, despite their total irrelevance in this matter. That Hunter himself would do this is especially egregious, because as a former film critic you would think he has the knowledge and connections to represent the matter fairly and accurately, instead of joining the aforementioned avalanche of assholes.
How can we possibly safely assume that without knowing the position of the camera and the camera operator and director? Honestly your last few posts in this thread have shown some weird anti-Baldwin bias and include the linking of an absolute trash article. You’re making assumptions absent much evidence, and you’re defending an article that contains several provably false things in it. For example here are some things Hunter wrote in his article:
Misses multiple entries on Baldwin’s resume after “The Getaway.”
This is a complete trash can statement, as was his previous comment that the gun has been used “thousands of times safely in Westerns.” I am willing to wager the vast, overwhelming majority of times the Colt single action revolver was used safely in movies, it was not loaded with real ammunition. The idea that “one has to wonder” if Baldwin’s “anger problems” means he refused any offers for help learning how to use the firearm is entirely scurrilous and without evidence at all. There’s never been any assertion that I’ve seen that Baldwin is a hot head on set, his anger problems have been interfamilial, with paparazzi and social media political disputes. If everyone who got in to an argument with his family or a political argument on social media was a raging hot head at work, a lot more people would be out of jobs.
Again, Hunter comes off like an idiot here by portraying this as “Baldwin not being familiar with the gun.” What Baldwin was not familiar with was having a gun loaded with real ammunition on a movie set. That is the core failure, and putting attention anywhere else, by a known foam at the mouth Trumper, is just more crying over spilled milk that someone was mean to their Trumpy god (and I have to wonder if that is your motivation for posting in this thread.)
Here Hunter writes more trash–his wild speculation about what Baldwin was doing is literally that, speculation, he has no idea.
His quoting the rules of gun safety is purely political–as has been well established in this thread, the rules of gun safety, in a controlled and safe fashion, are regularly by necessity violated on movie sets. That is why the role of technical workers who make it safe to violate those rules is so important.
This, again, is Hunter just speculating wildly, he has literally no evidence. FWIW, the possibility Baldwin accidentally fanned the gun is entirely possible, but he has literally no evidence, and he is speaking imperatively and making assertions about things he doesn’t know about. It’s frankly entirely possible Baldwin did not “accidentally” fan the gun, but actually cocked it and then accidentally pulled the trigger–the mechanics of the Colt single action are that when cocked, the trigger only requires 1/8th of a trigger press to fire, so it is in a state where it’s much easier to accidentally fire than normal no “fanning” required. But that’s speculation, I wasn’t there, and neither was this idiot Trumpy author.
The fact you would both post and defend this article speaks volumes to motivation, and it’s embarrassing that someone post and defend such abject trashcan writing.
I’m sorry that the personal lord and savior of the far-right Donald Trump lost reelection. I’m sorry that it upsets you that someone like Alec Baldwin made fun of him, repeatedly, on national TV. But it was easy to do, Trump was an imbecile and a buffoon, and easily mocked. He additionally has the thinnest of skins, which makes mocking him even more enjoyable. I’m sorry this has afflicted you with some sort of need to turn a terrible tragedy involving poor safety protocols on a movie set into an excuse to attack Alec Baldwin. Show some respect for the dead, if you have separate issues with Alec Baldwin, you’re more than free to attack him all day long, there’s plenty of ground for it, but you don’t need to link a terrible tragedy that almost certainly had zero to do with Baldwin’s personal character or behavior with prior dramas he has been involved in with the lunatic fringes of right-wing society and various personal demons he’s battled.
I think part of the reason it’s so gross is Baldwin does not really have one of the most stellar reputations to begin with, if you just wanted to bash Alec Baldwin all day long, you have a lot of ground to do it. Without turning a terrible tragedy in which a woman died, leaving behind a husband and young child, into a shitty meme to drive attention to assholes like Tucker Carlson.
I don’t believe she was operating the camera.
Uh. How did Trump get into this? Also, I’ve been defending Baldwin in this thread, and I thought he came off well while speaking to those TMZ reporters.
I have no idea what happened, you have no idea what happened, and Stephen Hunter has no idea what happened. We’re all speculating. I don’t think you need to take it so personally.
Correct – the camera operator’s name is Reid Russell. Last week, Russell submitted an affidavit of his account to investigators.
According to the article linked by Darren_Garrison, Baldwin reportedly said, “So, I guess I’m gonna take this out, pull it and go, ‘Bang!’”, so that is almost certainly what happened.
It’s a garbage article whose gross speculations based entirely on Baldwin’s character and background were left behind within the first hundred posts of this thread.
Do better.
And it’s probably the least stinky pile of horseshit in the entire Powerline blog site — it’s just another insurrection porn site providing right wing jack-off material for the MAGA crowd.
Y’know, looking at this…
… ISTM Hunter writes as someone somehow unaware of the information we have so far that there were no “old salt types” around for this. It is reported that even from the start, experienced armorers/prop masters refused to work for such a cheap sloppy operation. If anything the slightly more fair question should have been formulated as to whether Baldwin’s (and Hall’s – he also seems unaware of Halls’ “cold gun” call) standing and reputations precluded inexperienced, not well-established types from doing their jobs.
Hunter sounds to me as coming from a place where you’d find someone who’d describe himself as an “acknowleged” expert. So of course he can’t simply stop at providing his great explanation of how this firearm lent itself to things going wrong in the hands of someone not properly trained, and how that could have translated on set, but then feels duty bound to give us an implicit parenthetical lecture on the Four Rules, and raises the suprefluous question about whether a person’s temperament precluded someone educating him on the matter.
So Baldwin IS a western action shooter and is familiar with how to handle guns? I’m truly confused here.
I’ve never allowed someone to hand me a gun and declare it empty or chambered. I make them show me.
The production staff reportedly mocked the camera crew’s request for hotel rooms near the filming site, according to the LA Times.
So now we know. It wasn’t the gun that was cold. It was shit like this.
If you examine your screen closely, you will discover a scroll bar that allows you to travel back up and read the couple of hundred additional words I wrote which will alleviate your confusion regarding my opinion of the article.
I wouldn’t hold your breath on that.
Hope springs eternal.
I didn’t ask your opinion of the article or your ability to be snarky. I asked your opinion of Baldwin regarding his expertise as a western action shooter and his familiarity in handling guns.
Yes. The point is that protocol dictates that the gun should have been empty when Baldwin demonstrated the cross-draw. It should have been loaded with dummy bullets by the armorer just before the camera rolled. It should then have been cross-checked by the AD. None of those things happened.
I’m assuming the armorer did not load the live round(s) in the gun. As an armorer, she can tell the difference between blanks, dummies, and live ammo. I don’t think there’s reason to suspect she deliberately put the live rounds in the gun.
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If the gun had been empty during Baldwin’s demo cross-draw, the live round would not have been fired at that time.
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If Gutierrez had followed protocol and inserted blanks or dummies into the gun just before the camera rolled, the live round would not have been fired when the camera rolled.
I mean… have you ever fired a handgun yourself? Do you know about recoil? Or how slight movements of the hand can have a significant effect on where the gun is pointed when it actually discharges as opposed to where it was moments before?