Not only "Loaded with"
It should not have been loaded with anything.
Only a moron (which Baldwin qualifies as) would pull the trigger on a centerfire revolver at someone 6 feet away even if it WAS loaded with blanks.
Alec Baldwin charged again
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Not only "Loaded with"
It should not have been loaded with anything.
Only a moron (which Baldwin qualifies as) would pull the trigger on a centerfire revolver at someone 6 feet away even if it WAS loaded with blanks.
For some reason, our society -every single state- has laws that impose criminal punishment for killing a person through reckless or negligent behavior.
And thank goodness we do not live in a society in which a perpetrator can pay off a victim's family to avoid punishment for a crime.
There has been an endless stream of attempts to excuse Baldwin, but the fact remains that he pulled the trigger of a gun and killed a woman.
And turn into Goth Chicks.
Just my opinion:
The idea they use REAL GUNS to play make-believe is absolutely so smart and makes perfect sense.
Suspend all gun safety rules for Hollywood. We've all seen plenty of examples to convince us that nobody but absolute experts will be surrounding and playing with these guns.
Haha just kidding. The idea that people run around pointing guns (real actual GUNS) at each other while playing make believe is absolutely and completely idiotic. I don't care what Hollydumb "expert" they have for "safety".
Guns are guns. Rattlesnakes are rattlesnakes. Call them a "movie prop" or whatever you like. That doesn't change what they are.
The idea they use REAL GUNS to play make-believe is absolutely so smart and makes perfect sense.
Suspend all gun safety rules for Hollywood. We've all seen plenty of examples to convince us that nobody but absolute experts will be surrounding and playing with these guns.
Haha just kidding. The idea that people run around pointing guns (real actual GUNS) at each other while playing make believe is absolutely and completely idiotic. I don't care what Hollydumb "expert" they have for "safety".
Guns are guns. Rattlesnakes are rattlesnakes. Call them a "movie prop" or whatever you like. That doesn't change what they are.
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That was the implication...
I know that Baldwin is the one who pulled the trigger, but I feel like the most responsibility lies with the person who brought live ammunition onto the set and the person that loaded the gun and/or, checked it to make sure it was safe, before handing it to Baldwin.
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From what I remember reading, they had been shoot the gun with live ammo the day before.
To me it is a Total Failure have live ammo on a site where at most you only want blanks.
And then only in the guns that someone is going to pull the trigger on.
All of the guns not being "Shot" in the scene being filmed should be full on prop guns.
Those people should be identified and prosecuted. But in the end, it would not have mattered if Baldwin had not pointed a gun at a person and pulled the trigger. And that is the standard everyone is held to.
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Baldwin was not just an actor. He was in charge of and responsible for everybody on the set.
Yeh, but he wasn’t reckless or negligent. Seriously, if your kid hands you a cap gun, do you clear it and then reload?
No crime.
Yes, he pulled the trigger, and a woman died, but that doesn’t mean there was a crime. You’re driving down the road, car slides on black ice, it goes off an overpass, lands on a Honda Fit killing a family of clowns. You were obviously not in control of your vehicle, intentionally driving in conditions that made you unsafe, and as a result a bunch of clowns died…but you didn’t commit a crime. Same thing happens and you’re stinking drunk, then you commited a handful of crimes. A reasonable person could forsee that a drunk driver could kill clowns. No reasonable person could anticipate that firing a blank in a gun on a movie set with no live ammunition would kill someone at a distance greater than contact.
In hindsight and as gun people it’s easy to say that he could have done things to avoid this tragedy, but that he didn’t doesn’t make the act a crime.
Yes he was the producer and so has some umbrella responsibility for everything that happens, but that’s a civil argument, not criminal.
Not that any of this matters, he’ll never be convicted and it’s all just a waste of time and resources.
So based on some responses here, it's entirely normal to ignore the 3 fundamental rules of handling firearms if you're an actor? And then on top of that expect immunity when you kill someone because of it? That's hilarious.
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It's astonishing to me, honestly.
Ignore the rules and completely overlook the industry standard safety bulletins which is how the industry self-regulates.
It's a disconnect that doesn't appear possible to overcome.
The gun was real and the members of two grand juries believed Baldwin's actions were reckless or negligent.
Members of the Screen Actors Guild think it is reckless and negligent to point a gun at a person and pull the trigger. Although the case might be made that SAG members are not reasonable people.
Shitty all the way around, but not criminal IMO. Grand jury doesn’t count, they only hear one side of the story, lets see what the jury says.
Even if this was true, consider the thought process that determines firing a blank directly at someone 6 feet away is a good idea.
Seriously?
You think it's safe to be 6 feet away from the muzzle of a centerfire blank round when it goes off?
Say the prop guy hands him a knife, tells him it's a prop knife where the blade actually retracts into the handle, and tells him to stab another actor. In this case, as with the revolver (in my opinion), it is a relatively simple matter to see if the weapon is harmless or deadly. The person holding the weapon has it in his complete control, and has the means to discover whether the weapon is actually harmless. Knowing that what he is about to do could cause serious injury or death to another person, does he not have a responsibility to check for himself? Again, just my opinion, but I believe he does, and that failing to do so before he pulls the trigger is negligence.
Not sure what to say about this, but that is absolutely false. A google search of "killed by blank gun" should clear that up.
And, I gotta say, it's bizarre to compare this to sliding off an overpass, lol.
I listened to a gun YouTuber talk about this while I was working yesterday. He brought up some interesting points and I admit I haven't been keeping up with what's been going on with this. The video came up on autoplay and I didn't skip it for some reason.
The guy in the video made some good points in my opinion. I don't have enough info or background to have an opinion on the last bullet point but the rest I 100% agree with.
- He is not a fan of Alex Baldwin mostly due to his hypocrisy when it comes to guns. Baldwin has no problem using guns in his movies but then turns around and vilifies people who carry guns on their person.
- He does not take joy in fact that Baldwin is going through this. Also would not wish this on anyone bc it could easily happen to anyone when you deal with firearms all the time. Essentially what he's staying is the more times you handle a gun the more your chances of a ND go up.
- If Baldwin spent more time getting educated about firearm safety instead just vilifying people who owns firearm he would have known not to point a gun at anyone
- Follow all gun safety so you don't end up in a situation like this. People have been put in jail for 5-10 years for accidentally shooting someone.
- This guy thinks the armorer is the one that messed up and they should be the one held liable.
The guy in the video made some good points in my opinion. I don't have enough info or background to have an opinion on the last bullet point but the rest I 100% agree with.
- He is not a fan of Alex Baldwin mostly due to his hypocrisy when it comes to guns. Baldwin has no problem using guns in his movies but then turns around and vilifies people who carry guns on their person.
- He does not take joy in fact that Baldwin is going through this. Also would not wish this on anyone bc it could easily happen to anyone when you deal with firearms all the time. Essentially what he's staying is the more times you handle a gun the more your chances of a ND go up.
- If Baldwin spent more time getting educated about firearm safety instead just vilifying people who owns firearm he would have known not to point a gun at anyone
- Follow all gun safety so you don't end up in a situation like this. People have been put in jail for 5-10 years for accidentally shooting someone.
- This guy thinks the armorer is the one that messed up and they should be the one held liable.
Yeah I'm struggling with this myself. Especially the part when someone else hands you a gun and that absolves you of all responsibility.
Sure, got some links to folks being killed by blanks in handgun calibers at distances of 6’ or greater?
If you look I think you’ll find that there are 2 types of deaths from blanks, those where a projectile was lodged in the barrel and propelled by the firing of the blank, and more commonly those where the gun was in very close proximity to the victims head when fired. But I’m willing to learn, share a handful of links.
So.........you admit there are deaths from "blanks". You yourself note their are even two types of deaths from "blanks". And you note a "blank" can cause something else to strike somebody at some distance, certainly over 6 feet. Odd because you just said this:
But I myself would totally anticipate it and I have never even been on a Hollywood set.
Because I am reasonable. Any reasonable person should anticipate exactly that, based on what you yourself just posted above. They can kill you in more ways than one, right?
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Let's poke that idea into one of the multitude of Baldwin excuses.
A mindlessly drunk driver hits another car and kills the occupants of the other car. Should the drunk be held liable, or should the drunk be excused and the person who sold the drunk alcohol to get so dangerously drunk be hold liable?
My opinion doesn’t matter but I have worked in the film industry briefly and one of good friends use to rent props to producers to use during filming. I only built props but my friend is also an FFL and use to turn real guns into prop guns. The gun never should have been able to shoot. There should have been no live ammo on set period. Sure baldwin pulled the trigger but circumstances arose that should not have been possible. Who’s fault is it? I don’t know and it’s not for me to decide.
^^^ the best response in this thread.
You should move on from your red herring about blanks.
The woman was killed with a real gun. Whether somebody thought or said the gun was not loaded, or was loaded with dummy rounds or blanks is irrelevant.
The cardinal rules of firearms safety are NOT:
-- Never point your gun at anything you do not intend to shoot ... unless you think the gun is not loaded.
-- Treat all guns as though they are loaded ... except if somebody says they are not loaded.
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But they were blanks and it was a movie set. Ignoring specific facts to get to a specific outcome that you want is intellectually dishonest.
I‘m not a fan of the guy, what happens sucks, and it could have been avoided, but I don’t think it was criminal and I don’t like government repeatedly bludgeoning the guy over it.
The gun was NOT loaded with blanks, although you might be excused for being misinformed by the voluminous false claims being spun out about this case.
The FBI report (page 4 of PDF) is clear that Hutchins and Souza were shot with a round of live ammunition:
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Thank you for that, I might be snacking on some crow shortly, or at least admitting my ignorance. I had understood (misunderstood) that the fatal projectile had been lodged in the barrel the day before and expelled by the firing of a blank cartridge. The FBI report doesn’t make it clear that this isn’t what happened, but Is the current understanding that the revolver was supposed to be loaded with dummy rounds, but that it had at least one live round? That there were no blanks loaded?
Also, he says that he didn’t pull the trigger. Setting aside the belief I share that he did pull the trigger, do we know if the scene he was shooting called for a blank to be discharged, the hammer dropped on a dummy cartridge, or didn’t call for the hammer to be dropped at all?
oh, the angry emoji is for me.
The FBI report does not explicitly state how the revolver was loaded at the time of the incident. However, we can make some reasonable assumptions from the FBI's listing of ammo items.
The FBI list details 86 live rounds of ammunition, 50 rounds of blanks, and 53 dummy rounds.
-- The fatal bullet was #1, a spent casing was #3, and four live rounds were #4-#7 (on a cart or in a bandolier or holster).
-- All 50 blank rounds #10 were in a tray #9 in an ammo box #8.
-- All 53 dummy rounds were in boxes #11 and #20, along with 1 live round.
-- The 81 remaining live rounds all appear to have been exemplars collected from remote locations.
The full 50-round box of blanks strongly suggests that no blanks had been loaded in the gun.
The Sheriff's Statement of Probable Cause said this about the events leading to the shooting:
and:
The statement also said the powder in the live exemplar rounds seized offsite did not match the powder in the rounds on the set.
More than one person screwed up badly in this incident and I can only hope that all responsible parties are identified and held accountable.
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If I am up to speed now, it was apparently supposed to be a scene where it was important to have the bullets visible in the cylinder, but there wasn’t going to be any actual firing. While my dummy rounds are always easily distinguished from live, I get the sense that these dummy rounds were not. The armorer messed them up and the FBI didn’t mention them being distinguishable In the field.
As the actor, was there anything he could have seen if he'd checked the gun, other than that it wasn’t a plastic replica that would have sufficed for this scene? He was expecting something that looked like a loaded gun, and he got what looked like a loaded gun, or have I missed something?
Makes sense to me that the box of blanks was full, the scene called for dummy rounds, not blanks.
From a safety perspective, do we know if on-set safety protocols apply if there isn’t going to be any discharge of a firearm? Seems critical to establishing liability, safety protocols apply, did someone decide to ignore them, and if so, who? I get that he’s the executive and has ultimate responsibility, but that’s more a civil concept than criminal, people rarely go to jail when their only “crime” was that a subordinate did something wrong and they failed to catch it. If he ordered it, different outcome.
The armorer‘s error seems to be the root cause of this tragedy. Do we know if Baldwin even knew that there were live rounds on set? I assume that he’s still limiting his statements to “I didn’t pull the trigger.”
I still don’t see a clear bridge from what he did to criminal responsibility as an actor. Haven’t enough facts or spent enough time thinking about it to have an opinion about his liability as an executive for the film.
Many of the questions you are asking, and points you are making are refuted, in the safety bulletin referenced in several posts.
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Page 7 of the FBI report defines live, blank, and dummy rounds and some of the ways they are differentiated.
Baldwin has repeatedly bragged about his extensive firearms experience in scores of movies and TV shows. It would have been trivial for an experienced individual to flip open the revolver's loading gate and let a round slide out of the cylinder to confirm what the gun contained.
The young armorer was grossly irresponsible and I was not impressed by her effort to dispose of drugs she had on her person when the incident occurred. But her recklessness does not excuse someone as experienced as Baldwin from being safe.
As to Baldwin's responsibility, read page 9 of the Statement of Probable Cause, which absolutely skewers Baldwin for repeatedly flaunting standard industry safety practices and even the most basic rules of gun handling.
I'll bring back up something I said in another thread here. That was a single action revolver. It's not "just pull the trigger". It's pull the hammer back then pull the trigger. It's a 2 step process. And not two steps you take accidentally.