The bullet is on its way to wherever it was pointed by the time you feel the recoil. I’m not sure why it’s controversial to make the assumption that the gun was pointed at Ms. Hutchins when the trigger was pulled. She wouldn’t be dead if it wasn’t pointed at her.
She wouldn’t be dead if it wasn’t discharged at her. I’m not sure why it’s controversial to make the assumption that people sometimes don’t even hit what they’re aiming at, much less what they’re just sort of pointing at for visual effect in no expectation of a discharge.
So I have to ask again… have you ever fired a handgun before?
I have fired handguns. I’m not saying Baldwin was aiming the gun at anyone, but it was obviously pointed at what the bullet hit. How could it be otherwise?
The only thing you can make any statement about is where the bullet went. Where the gun is pointed is not necessarily where the projectile will go. Handguns can be notoriously unreliable beyond a few feet, especially older ones, and god alone knows what it was loaded with.
You seem to be making a big deal of the fact that at some instant Baldwin was pointing the gun at Ms. Hutchins, as if to rule out the possibility that the discharge did not happen in the context of him pointing the weapon at the camera, perhaps owing to his inexperience or just outright incompetence with handling a handgun even in the context of filming a movie. It is the easiest thing in the world to point a pistol at something, pull the trigger (or not, I mean, TBD still as to why the gun discharged) and find the bullet has not, in fact, hit the precise spot you were consciously “pointing” it at (or, again, even “aiming” at), but rather some point a few inches on either side. Or maybe more.
That you seem to think where the bullet hit is indicative of where Baldwin was consciously (and, up until the moment just before discharge, actually) pointing the gun at leads me to question your level of experience. I mean, it’s literally the first thing you learn in firing a pistol that the thing often will not hit what you are pointing at just before you pull the trigger or the gun goes off for… some other reason.
How many times do I have to say that I don’t think Baldwin was deliberately aiming or pointing (or whatever word you want to use) the gun at anyone or anything. But how can it be argued that the muzzle of the firearm wasn’t pointed at Ms. Hutchins when the bullet was discharged? You agree that the bullet went in a straight line from the muzzle of the gun into the victim, yes?
Let’s just circle it back to what you wrote:
You think the fact that Baldwin hit something other than the camera he was supposed to be aiming at for the upcoming scene tells us something about his level of experience. This, even as handguns have a well-known tendency to be off by a couple of inches when fired, even at close range, even when aimed and fired deliberately.
Sorry, no. I do not grant your conclusion. I do not think Hunter has made his “main point” as you describe it in any way convincingly.
Sure, Baldwin might have been examining the muzzle and not realized he was pointing it at someone. Or… he might have been pointing it straight at the camera, as planned, and when it went off a slight wavering of the hand caused it to miss the camera by a couple of inches and hit the DP. Or none of the above. My point is, again, simply that Hunter’s “main point” as you see it is not well made.
What is your source that Baldwin was aiming at the camera when the gun went off?
And how could he be aiming at a camera but hit someone standing next to it? They were in a tiny church.
Maybe I’m crazy but I maintain the gun wasn’t pointed at the camera. I submit as supporting evidence the fact that there is no bullet hole in the camera.
I have seen new handgun shooters aim at something and hit the ground 6 feet in front of it. New shooters aiming at a man-sized target 15 feet away will often miss. If Baldwin wasn’t trying for accuracy that barrel could have been swinging all over the place. Just jerking your finger on the trigger can be enough to move your point of aim several feet at that distance.
Anyway, we are all just speculating blindly now. The only thing that’s ‘clear’ at this point is that the reporting has been, as usual, godawful. The number of contradictions and competing claims that have appeared in various articles are ridiculous. Was there plinking going on with set guns? Was the cart unattended, or was the armorer just forced to wait outside with it because of Covid protocols? Did the armorer show the gun’s state to the AD, or didn’t she? Early reports said she was nowhere to be found, while later reports said she was there when the gun was discharged.
As for the Stephen Hunter article, I thought it was pretty weak. Most of it was just rampant speculation about how Baldwin was using the gun. And he missed the most important reason that specific model of gun was more dangerous on a movie set: It is much more difficult to inspect it to make sure it’s safe, because the cylinder doesn’t swing out.
Imagine this scenario: Armorer goes to lunch. Someone shoots the gun, but leaves one live bullet in it. Armorer comes back, loads three dummies. There are now three dummies, two open cylinder positions, and a real bullet. AD cormes out, and she shows him the gun and says, “Okay, there’s nothing in here but three dummies. I’ll show you.” She then rotates the cylinder until the first dummy appears. Rotates again, second dummy. Rotates again, third dummy. Rotates again, open cylinder position. “Good enough?” “Yep.”
There’s now a live bullet in the position that will rotate it into firing position the next time the hammer is pulled back.
AD goes back in, confident that he was just positively shown a ‘cold’ gun. He announces same, gives the gun to Baldwin, and Baldwin procedes to practice with it.
IF that scenario is true (and it could be), then first responsibility is to whoever put a live round in the gun, and the person who brought live rounds onto the set. Next up would be the armorer, who made a mistake she shouldn’t have, and who is supposedly trained and hired to prevent exactly this.
The AD would perhaps bear some responsibility as well, since he is the final authority for safety on set. But not being trained in guns, he has to rely somewhat on the expertise of the armorer - especially with an old period piece he may not be familiar with. If the armorer said the gun was cold and showed it to him in a way that supposedly proved it, it’s tough to assign a whole lot of blame to him.
Baldwin himself would deserve the least amount of blame here in his role as an actor. The AD didn’t show him the state of the gun, maybe because he didn’t even know how to do it, and maybe because he thought that because the armorer just showed him and the gun never left his hand after that, another check was redundant. Maybe Baldwin even saw him being shown that the gun was ‘cold’, for all we know. In any case, his singular error of not demanding that the AD open up the gun and show him seems to me to be a small error that wouldn’t have mattered if the professionals responsible for making sure the gun was safe was doing her job.
It may even be that COVID protocols are partly to blame, because they forced the AD to act as an intermediary between the armorer and the actor.
Now, I could cherry pick ‘facts’ from other ‘reputable’ press reports and concoct a scenario where almost all the blame falls on Baldwin. Or the AD. For example, maybe the armorer was in the process of checking the gun when the AD stormed out and grabbed it from her. Or maybe she left the guns unattended as some reports said. Maybe she was the one who was plinking with the actors, as at least one story said, and was grossly negligent. Or maybe she properly locked ip the guns and someone else with the key took them and used them.
So really, we have no clue. But I have no problem with Baldwin waving the gun arohnd and practicing pulling it quickly and aiming it at the camera. That’s what he had to do when the cameras were rolling. The rules about never pointing a gun at something you don’t plan to destroy clearly don’t apply on movie sets. Even if actors are told to aim slightly off, if they have never fired a gun, there’s no guarantee at all that they are aiming safely. The ultimate safety on set has to be the procedures that ensure there is never a live round in a gun, or anywhere near a set. They are the first line of defense, and clearly failed somewhere.
I assume he wasn’t aiming at anyone since the goal wasn’t to actually fire at someone but to draw and point in a general direction. He wasn’t trying to shoot someone.
And your post was mocked because it was a bad faith post and a poor quality one at that. @Cervaise said the article was horseshit, with an immediate follow up post explaining the reasons he thought the article was horseshit. You then responded with a bad faith question that sought to narrow the discussion to a single point in the article, instead of what everyone who has criticized it has said–that the overall article is trash, with many specific examples as to why. Even a trash article can contain some correct information.
What we do know for a fact is Hunter, yourself, nor anyone else posting in this thread has any actual idea what Baldwin’s training and experience with firearms, Western action shooting or etc might be. I don’t have any particular reason to think Baldwin is an expert at handling firearms, but that’s different from believing I have proof as to his level of firearm knowledge or how well he understands Western action shooting. The claim suffers from all the factual claims Hunter makes in the article–they are suppositions stated as fact. End of story.
My question was front and center to the thread. the article posted was favorable to Baldwin yet the author was vilified for what looks like political reasons.
So again I ask, is Baldwin considered knowledgeable about guns? It puts him in a better light to say he isn’t. It means there should have been more coordination and training. Acting is make-believe. Guns are not.
No one knows the answer to your question because it is not publicly known information. Stephen Hunter was incorrect to assert he knew the answer to it, and the article was not favorable to Baldwin.
It is completely irrelevant to the incident, as has been laboriously thrashed out over the last twelve hundred posts. Weapon safety in the context of a film shoot is at best a cousin to weapon safety in the context of real-world firearms use. Even a fully competent actor is still expected to adhere to the external protocols imposed chiefly by the armorer and more broadly by the production team. These rules and practices have been established to ensure safety regardless of the actor’s expertise.
For Hunter to attempt to inject this viewpoint into the dialogue right now is ignorance at best and false disingenuousness at worst. And at this point in the thread, it’s bad-faith backsliding. Baldwin is not the story here, despite our celebrity-media trained instincts to make him the story. I noted this in my very first post, and until the Hunter article created this idiotic tangent, this thread had done a pretty good job leaving that dumb notion behind.
Also, the only perspective from which that article can be seen as favorable to Baldwin is the frothing right-winger who wants him burned alive on principle, for whom any grudging concession of reduced culpability feels like diplomatic compromise. Out here in the real world, the article is obviously a snide takedown, using perjoratives like “tenderfoot” to mock his actorly pretention at wearing the mantle of a Western gunfighter, sneering with every sentence that this historical firearm is best left to expert weapons-masters, so of course that nancy boy Baldwin fucked it up.
Horseshit from top to bottom, and fully deserving of the mockery and dismissal it has received here.
Perhaps of some interest here:
Already posted above.
Halls lawyers are claiming it wasn’t his responsibility to check the guns.
That contradicts all the industry standards that I’ve read and have seen discussed here.
It may not have been his obligation to check the gun, but once he takes custody of it, even briefly, then I’d argue he’s assuming some responsibility.
As a comparison - someone might ask me to move their vehicle from one parking spot to another. Although I am not responsible for ascertaining the street-worthiness of said vehicle, it is still on me not to, say, leave it on a slope with no consideration for whether or not it could roll down the hill and injure someone. That would be on me. Nor should I hand it off to yet another person in a careless and irresponsible manner.
He may be right in claiming that he wasn’t responsible for checking the gun but then why did he declare “cold gun” when handing it over? If it were me and it was something I hadn’t checked, I would have said nothing or pointed out that I had not verified anything.
Well, that’s the difference between responsible and irresponsible, wouldn’t you think?
This tragedy requires that no one involved had any form of ill intent. It only requires carelessness.
There are some activities extremely unforgiving of human lapses. Firearms are one of those areas.