A better analogy would be if the brakes were fine and then they suddenly gave out in the middle of operating the vehicle. There would be absolutely no way for the driver to test that or predict it unless they made a visual inspection of the brakes and had the mechanical expertise to predict the failure, and that would have been neither the driver’s responsibility nor expected of them.
Well, an even better analogy would be if cars had a special way of checking the brakes, and that the written procedures were that the driver was supposed to inspect the brakes every time after service to make sure they were properly set up, and the driver failed to do that. The mechanic did the brakes wrong, but thr final check was the driver’s responsibility and he didn’t do it.
Or a real example from aviation: A pilot tells the ground crew to fill up his plane, then goes in to do paperwork. He comes out, and is supposed to check the tanks himself. But hey, this is a good ground crew, and every time he’s checked for the last five years they filled the tanks properly. So he skips the mandatory check, goes flying, runs out of gas because the tanks weren’t filled, and crashes.
Whose fault is it?
I know I’m a little late to the party, but I think it’s improper to put ANY of the burden of making sure a prop gun is safe on the actor. I can only think of myself. I’m not a gun person, I’m not familiar with guns, I don’t want to be around guns. If I were an actor, I wouldn’t want the life or death responsibility of inspecting a gun, nor would I think I should have that burden put on me. No more than the actor is responsible for making sure the set’s fire alarms have batteries in them, or that the emergency exits aren’t blocked. There are professionals who know what they’re doing (or at least there should be) for that stuff. No part of critical, life or death jobs should be assigned to a nonprofessional, untrained actor. I wouldn’t expect the actor to do it any more than I would expect the janitor or the caterer to.
You could make the same argument for pilots. If a professional did the maintenance, why should the pilot have to check?
The answer is because fundamentally unsafe things are made safe by checks and re-checks, so that a single point of failure or a moment of inattention does not cause a disaster.
As a professional actor willing to handle guns, and being the one who will ultimately pull the trigger, why shouldn’t the actor be trained to make sure the gun is safe? And they ARE trained. The procedure is that the armorer is supposed to SHOW the actor that the gun is empty, and the actor is not supposed to accept the gun until it has been shown to be safe. That did not happen here.
I would agree that the armorer bears the majority of the blame. But if there was a procedure the actor was trained and expected to do which would have prevented the accident, and the actor didn’t do it, then some culpabiity surely rests there. Maybe not much, but some.
Not really. A pilot is a professional in the aviation field. An actor may not have even one second of experience with guns.
An actor who handles guns is supposed to be trained to do so, So acting is a profession that may require the handling of real guns, and actor’s guilds have put rules into place demanding that actors who handle guns are trained on them, including the procedure for accepting a gun from an armorer and ensuring it is not loaded. So yes, the analogy holds. An actor using a gun is a professional who is supposed to have specific training on how to safely handle guns. If an actor says, “I don’t like guns, know nothing about them, and don’t plan to learn” they should find another role.
Alec Baldwin had that training. He has been handling guns in movies for decades, by all accounts responsibly. But this time he and everyone else dropped a mandatory safety procedure, and it cost a life.
The circumstances around this draw another parallel to aviation: The accident happened because normal procedures had to be set aside due to Covid restrictions. Like aviation, these sorts of accidents often happen when people are knocked off their standard path of behaviour by some event, which causes them to forget or ignore a crucial step. Like a pilot being interrupted in the middle of a checklist, then starting again in the wrong place and missing a procedure.
I’m not convinced that this is true or that it even should be true.
Like if there is a scene on set where the main characters disarm bomb, and then during rehearsal the bomb goes off, people saying that the actors should be trained to work with real bombs have completely lost the plot. There should not be a real bomb anywhere near an actor, much like there should not be a real gun anywhere near an actor.
Or real ammunition.
But there ARE real guns around actors, which is why they get training.
Here’s what the Screen Actor’s Guild has to say about it (already posted in this thread)
Under the section specific to firearms, Rule #1 was violated by Baldwin:
Remember, these are the instruction for actors, not the weapons pros. Baldwin pointed the gun at the cinematographer and shot her. Inadvertently, but if he had followed rule #1 it wouldn’t have happened.
He also violated rule #2, which is never place your finger on the trigger until you are ready to shoot. That gun didn’t fire itself. He also violated the rule about requiring the armorer to demonstrate that the gun was unloaded before accepting it. That’s three rules broken, any of which had it been followed would have prevented the accident.
To be fair, the armorer broke a hell of a lot more rules than that. She allowed live ammo on set, she left the guns unattended, she didn’t check them before the scene, etc. And she’s the licensed pro, so her and the ultimate safety officer bear the large amount of the blame. But Baldwin isn’t completely innocent, and ‘not trained’ is not an excuse, because he had the training, and must have sat through gun safety lectures many times on set. It’s mandatory.
I would absolutely design it differently. I wouldn’t want actors to be any part of the process. I think it’s foolish that they are included.
If an actor does not want to be included, then the actor should not audition for roles in movies that have firearms. No one is being forced to take a role.
I’m saying movies shouldn’t have real firearms.
I should clarify. I view guns in movies exactly the same way I view explosives in movies. The actor should not be any part of the safety process for explosives. In my mind, I see no distinction between that and guns.
If a movie gun absolutely must be indistinguishable from real, a stunt double should handle it. (Much like they would handle the explosion part.)
Or, we can have the supposed professionals do their job well enough that no live rounds are on set and this would be a moot problem. If the armorer cannot tell the difference between a live round and a dummy, why would we expect actors to?
This whole thing should never got past the armorer at all. It was her job to make sure each round was inspected individually as they were loaded and she couldn’t even get that right. She was already responsible for at least two negligent discharges on the set. Letting the AD bully her about safety concerns is all on her too.
As for the Baldwin/pilot comparison, not even close. A pilot is a professional at checking their aircraft before flight. An actor is a professional at acting, not gun handling, and they shouldn’t be treated as such.
Except he was told he had a non functioning gun and even if he had fired it, it would have been no big deal. The problem was the live rounds that the armorer hand loaded in the gun.
As for the Rule #1, back at the beginning of this thread there were various quotes from actors saying they had never had anyone show them a gun was safe, all they knew about was they were told cold gun on the set. Rule or not, it didn’t seem to be followed with any regularity.
It’s like having a flight attendant be responsible for safely flying a plane. They’re a professional employed by the airline, and they surely have much more experience with the operation of an airplane than your average person, but they are in no way qualified to ensure the safe operation of the plane itself. Their role is to show passengers what to do in case of an emergency and to assist them if an emergency occurs, but their ability to prevent a plane from crashing is limited to making sure the pilots seem okay. (And I’m not sure how much authority they even have there.)
This would be a good question to ask @LSLGuy since he is one (pilot). I’m guessing there are all kinds of fail safes between pilots, flight officers and flight attendants, no doubt unseen by mere passengers.
RE: #2 - As I recall, he says he didn’t have his finger on the trigger and it was a hammer-fall that caused the discharge (he palmed the hammer back, didn’t get it far enough to lock and when it fell, the bullet discharged), but my recollection may be inaccurate.
I’m much more confident on #3, the gun wasn’t supposed to be “unloaded”. They were doing closeups and chambers are visible on a revolver. It was supposed to be loaded with dummy rounds (not even blanks that go bang) - i.e., a “cold” gun, but not an empty one. But then, looking at your safety bulletin, I can’t seem to find where this is even a “rule” although it may (and probably should) be best practice.
Charged with involuntary manslaughter
I’m surprised they charged Alec Baldwin. I think I noted before that the FBI forensic report seemed to be missing some scenarios. A poorly reloaded cartridge can crush the primer a bit and make it extra sensitive. I don’t know if there is any analysis that can be done after the fact on the casing to tell if this happened.
What’s more likely (just my opinion) is that Baldwin had the trigger held down while manipulating the hammer so he could just move it back and forth as much as he wanted. So technically it might be true that he didn’t ‘pull the trigger’ because it was already pulled.
He was the one holding the weapon.
There is an old Army saying:
It’s not your fault.
But it is your responsibility.
So it might as well be your fault.