We’re witnessing, and will continue to witness, a rousing game of blame-shifting. The stakes are high – both civilly, and – for some – potentially criminally.
The lawyers are doing what lawyers do, and it’s never pretty.
This will be important to pin down. If the AD declared the gun cold on his own or took the word of a random person on set, then the AD will shoulder a lot of the blame. But if the armorer told the AD that the gun was cold, then I would think the armor would be to blame.
You’re free to burn Hunter to the ground but gun safety is not a second cousin to anything regardless of location or the people involved. While movie sets are fantasy this was a real world firearm and the person using it killed someone.
If your perception of gun safety is shared by the industry then failure to follow gun safety rules will result in more deaths.
This is obviously false. Gun safety in general means don’t pull the trigger unless you intend to shoot something, don’t point at anything you don’t want to kill, etc. On film sets, you have to do those things, or you just can’t have guns in the movies. I’m sure you didn’t intentionally misunderstand @Cervaise, but maybe try reading it again.
The author of that article made the same mistake – reciting the general rules of gun safety when they don’t really apply to cold prop guns on movie sets.
If only there were a 1200-post thread you could read to become better informed.
I understand that Hall’s attorney(s) have the obligation to give their client the best possible criminal and civil defense. I may not like their strategy but he/she knows their client better than anyone.
The movie industry had almost thirty years to write and refine the gun safety rules. I would expect that the union contracts leave little room for “it’s not my responsibility” defense. We won’t know for sure until the experts study the contracts.
I’m sure the production’s insurance policy also has very explicit clauses covering set safety.
Good point.
A redundant safety system shouldn’t fail unless a cavalier attitude has been allowed to flourish.
Then he had no business declaring it was a cold gun as he handed it to the actor.
Ideally, he wouldn’t have handed it to the actor at all but rather, let the armorer do it, but as we’ve read, procedures were sloppy on this set.
I used to be very familiar with production insurance, though that was more than 20 years ago, and you might be surprised by how generic the policies and coverages are (a lot more effort went into identifying exposed equipment and employees than tailoring it to production). The insurance company might have underwriting guidelines, however, about what they might or might not cover. OR film production insurance may have evolved a lot since my time.
More tricky will be the general topic of insurance and indemnification. The production company will be invoking their workers’ compensation policy here to pay death and medical benefits, while at the same time I’d guess the family will attempt to sue anyway. Generally speaking that doesn’t work, even in the presence of gross negligence, but I don’t know how New Mexico works specifically.
I’m guessing Baldwin’s lawyers would have advised him to not speak to the victim’s family or to cooperate with the police. His publicist may have had a different idea. I think he chose correctly.
Last I heard, neither the armorer nor the assistant director on the set that day were union employees. In which case union rules may not apply to them.
Money providers often bitch about the additional expense of a union production, but unions are not entirely bad. Still, hiring inexperienced staff outside of union rules and long established rules/procedures can lead to this sort of mess.
You mean the thread about someone dying because of poor gun safety? This one.
that’s pretty much it.
Your contributions to this discussion demonstrate that you don’t understand the topic and have made no effort to remedy this. Expect no further response.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed lawyers speculate it might be set sabotage. I think it depends on how many live rounds were in the gun and in the box. Only one would seem highly suspicious.
I target practice with a revolver. It’s very easy to unload and quite obvious if the cylinder chambers are empty. Modern revolvers have a ejector that empties all the cylinders. I don’t know if Baldwin’s old west replica revolver had one. The armorer may have used a ejector tool. My Ruger single six is a western replica and it has a ejector.
Hannah should have checked the markings on each round. But I can understand how easily one hot round in a box of prop loads could be missed.
Something to keep in mind for the people who seem to randomly be obsessed with enforcing rules of gun safety from the “real world”, that by necessity are very regularly broken on movie sets–Baldwin made a good point in his roadside interview. Guns and gunplay are tremendously common in movies. Since the 1920s there have been thousands of movies with guns and gunplay. In those thousands of movies I would wager with all the different takes and etc, probably many millions, possibly billions of rounds have been fired on American movie sets (rounds encompassing things like blanks, squibs et al.) In all that time we’ve had a small handful of deaths.
In such a controlled environment, where you can have almost absolute control of it, any death is unacceptable. However, compare that to how many fatal gun accidents occur in a single year, many involving self-proclaimed “gun experts” with NRA gun safety training and all that. The Stephen Hunters of the world reciting inapplicable standard gun safety rules that by necessity do get broken on movie sets are pretty far off base.
Hell in the early days they didn’t use squibs to simulate bullet hits. They had a sharpshooter firing live bullets towards the actors. This scene is a good example of that. With automatic weapons.
Her lawyers will put forward any argument they can think of, but it’s pretty farfetched, and doesn’t exonerate Gutierrez anyway.
Cunning plot: ‘I want revenge! I know, I’ll put this live bullet that I happen to have on me in this unattended box of dummy ammo. Maybe the armorer will choose that particular round out of the box when she goes to load the gun. And maybe she won’t check, and will load the live round. And maybe she won’t rotate the cylinder properly when she demonstrates the gun is cold. And maybe nobody will notice. And maybe this live round will be under the hammer when the gun is fired. And maybe it will cause some damage. That will teach them!’
Regardless, it was Gutierrez’s duty to check what she loaded into the gun, and to demonstrate properly that it was cold. That failure can only be on her, and nothing can get round that.
She wasn’t the one to hand the gun to Baldwin, and it’s still not clear if she was involved when the AD took it off the cart. It’s still possible, as far as I can tell, that she didn’t do the normal checks because she wasn’t involved.
<rank speculation>
She could have taken the guns out of storage, put them on the cart, rolled them over to the building, and gone to do something else. She hasn’t done the normal checks, because the time to do them hasn’t come yet.
The AD takes a gun off the cart, and the first Gutierrez knows of it is the sound of a gunshot.
</rank speculation>
This seems as plausible as anything else given the facts we know. It doesn’t absolve her of all responsibility, but in this scenario the failure would not “only be on her”.
Actually, from the warrant, she was involved:
During an interview with David Halls, when Affiant asked David about the safety protocol on set in regards to firearms, he advised, “I check the barrel for obstructions, most of the time there’s no live fire, she (Hannah) opens the hatch and spins the drum, and I say cold gun on set.” 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.
In other words, she handed him the gun, but didn’t properly demonstrate that it was cold.