Gun Free Zone

I had meant to write about “The Four Rules work” last night but decided on a different style of article.

After reading about Alec Baldwin killing a person on set, there was an uproar in the gun community. Many of us wanted Alec arrested and treated like we assume we would be treated. Others advocated from “positions of knowledge” to tell us that it was never Alec’s fault, he was just a trained monkey.

Turns out that Alec was more than just a trained monkey in front of the camera. He was also the producer, which meant he was also responsible for the safety culture on set.

What I really wanted to talk about was, “how come this didn’t happen way back when?” They used to make a “western” a week. There were weekly westerns, which often included gun fights. Why didn’t we see or hear about accidents back then?

Even before Jeff Cooper made his four rules famous, there were westerns shot without incident. How come?

Let’s start with A Fistful of Dollars

In this quick draw scene, nobody is in the line of fire for either shooter.  Clint’s gun is pointed to his left as he fans the hammer.  His intended targets are all offscreen.  He is pointing his gun at nothing.  The bad guy is still in the middle of his draw.  It might look like he is muzzling himself, but it is more likely his muzzle is in front of him.  If you look at the background, the only person is behind Clint.  The bad guy can aim at the fountain, and it will still seem like he is aiming at Clint.

Clint has the bad guy at gun point.  But there is nobody where his gun is pointing.

Shooting at Clint.  But nobody is where that gun is pointing.

Moving on to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, we see the same sort of thing.  Even more, while we see the character’s loading guns from time to time, when you look at closeups of the guns you find something interesting.

If you look at the revolver, you should notice that it doesn’t have a loading gate.  That is because this is a cap and ball revolver.  There is no cap on the nipples.  This makes it trivial to verify that the gun cannot fire.

You can see the game being played in these two side by side shots, just before the big gun fight.  The pistol belt has cartridges in it.  All of those cartridges would have been dummy rounds.  Take careful note of the pistol, though.  It is a cap and ball revolver.

The left image is part of the montage of quick cuts between the three actors.  There is no reason for there to even be dummy rounds in that revolver.

The right image is just before he draws.  This is a single cut.  In this image, you can see that his right hand has moved slightly AND there are now caps on the nipples of the revolver.  When Van Cleef draws, he will pull the hammer back and fire the gun.  There will be a soft pop from the cap and a flash.  There may or may not be powder in the chamber.

Regardless, there will be nobody where he is pointing the pistol when he shoots.

In a dozen movies I watched shortly after the Rust shooting, I only saw a couple of scenes where the pistol might have been pointing near a person.  All of those scenes were framed in such a way that it is possible for the gun to have been pointing away from all people.

It is certainly possible to film dangerous looking scenes involving guns without actually putting people at risk.

Harsh but accurate. Everything is how it is advertised, including death.

I forget where I got it, but kudos anyway.

J.Kb mentioned the scooter shooter in NYC picking people at random and I wanted to expand on that.

Old time readers know I have a very much standing (and well-founded) paranoia about motorcycles. It took a lot of reprogramming to figure out motorcycle culture in the US is a whole ‘nother animal that the one from Venezuela. First of all, people in Venezuela that need to use motorcycles, could not afford a Harley or any of the big cylinder bikes, nor the super-sporty rice burners or pasta squealers.  By the same token, Americans do not understand that a lot of people down there use low powered motorcycled because they are cheap, easy to maintain and can ride around the perennial gridlocked traffic of the mayor cities. And that ability to lane split (even if it is illegal) make the scooters and low powered bikes and advantage when your business is crime.

Scooters are still used, but they dropped in popularity by the 80s. They were too easy to steal and seen as not very macho for the Latino mind, my buess is the thing with the legs: sitting daintly versus ridding with open legs. Go figure.

This is pretty much the ideal bike for the “motorizado”:

Different variations, permutations and brands from 50 cc to 250cc make it the preferred means of transportation for the poor. They do things with it that we would do with cars, of course, safety is not a big priority.

Now, i can drop another thousand words and not be able to accurately describe the utter madness of tens of thousands of this bikes during your daily commutes, so I add a couple of videos or normal traffic conditions in Caracas.

And, of course, it makes it easy to approach any car and rob the occupant at gunpoint.

Now you guys get why I have this issue with bikes?

I may get better…. one day.

This “Film Crawl” came about because Alec Baldwin shot and killed his cameraman. I believe that we can all agree that Alec Baldwin is guilty of manslaughter at the very least. Likely murder.

The short of it was that he took a pistol that he might have thought was unloaded, pointed at his cameraman, and pulled the trigger. This resulted in the death of his cameraman and injury to his director.

Now Alec is a trained monkey. He is supposed to hit his mark and say his lines with the right emotion. Ne is not expected to be a firearm guru.

He is expected to know the four safety rules, and to follow them. If he is not following them, there damn well better be no other way to do it, and every safety precaution should be taken.

I have some snap-caps, but not for every caliber. Most of the time I don’t need them, or I use just a case. After learning of the Rust incident, I learned a bit more about safety on set and made up a few dummy rounds for testing feeding or loading issues.

Every dummy round has an expended primer in it or hot glue. There are NO pristine primers. If the primer has no dimple, it is a live round.

Each dummy round has two metal BB’s in it. If you shake the dummy round, you can hear the BB’s rattling around in there.

Finally:

• Treat every firearm as if it is loaded.
• Never point your firearm at something you are not willing to destroy or kill
• Make sure you identify your target and what is beyond it.
• Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.

Even when I KNOW it is a dummy round, I do not point the firearm at anything I’m not willing to destroy, and I treat it as if it has live ammo in it.

I had issues with feeding on one of my Winchester ’94s (post ’64). This meant that I was running the lever and watching how it feed into the chamber. This would cause there to be a round in the chamber with the hammer back, cocked. A mistake could have caused the hammer to drop. Using dummy rounds made this safer.

I was having issues loading rounds into my r92. A couple of dummy rounds let me get things figured out in a safer way.

If I’m working with dummy rounds, there are no live rounds in the area. I can’t say room because often I’m doing work on the dinning room table and there are live rounds and magazines in the dining room.

On the Rust set, they were using the “prop” guns for target practice. All the guns used were real guns. They were not disabled in any fashion. Put a live round in them, pull the trigger, “BANG”. And the crew at least was using them for target practice.

This meant that people were bringing live rounds onto the set. A big NO NO NO.

They were putting live rounds into a prop gun. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!

The production team was rushing the armorer (unconfirmed), which led to a pistol with live rounds being taken by the 2ndassistant, who declared it “cold”. It does not appear that the armorer had checked the weapon to verify it was “cold” and the 2nd assistant didn’t either.

Then Alec took that gun, did not verify it was cold. There is a statement that actors are not allowed to check if the gun they are handed is cold, “for safety reasons”. If Alec had opened the loading gate, rotated the cylinder 7 times, he would have been able to see the unfired primer on at least one of the cartridges loaded.

He didn’t. He pulled the hammer back. Pointed the gun at a person, and pulled the trigger. The gun performed exactly as designed and fired the round.

Second City Cop

And as expected, he has not many good things about what is going on in the Windy City.

We had family come and visit for the holiday week.

We went to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The downtown area is nicely walkable with small businesses that cater to tourists.

What a fucking Leftist place that is.

Half the businesses there had an assortment pf Pride flags, signs that said “we support LGBT artists,” and “trans people belong here.”

I kept my mouth shut.

One store took it to the next level.

On top of the plethora of Pride flags, they had a sticker with the likeness of President Ronald Reagan with the caption, “It’s me, I’m the problem.”

Really?

I left, I made no bones about my departure.

But here is ultimately what pisses me off.

My entire life I heard how Reagan’s treatment of the Aids crisis in the 80s was a disaster and cost lives.

Then, in 2022 we had the Monkeypox epidemic.

The Monkeypox epidemic vindicated Reagan.

It didn’t matter how much warning was given about Monkeypox, the gay community kept engaging in large scale, anonymous, fucking and sucking, and Monkeypox spread like a campfire in a California forest.

We were told it was outright homophobic to expect the gays to take a pause from their bath house and sex club fuck and suck fest to slow the spread.

We had to locked down for COVID, but the gays had a natural right to fuck and suck whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted, in a big fucking pile at every Pride fest in the country, and we were the bigots for noticing that those events led to Monkeypox outbreaks.

The only conclusion that I can come to is that I didn’t matter what Reagan did in the 80s.

He and C. Everett Koop could have handled written a personalized warning to each and every gay man in the country, and they still would have gone to the bath houses and gay porn theaters and fucked and sucked the Aids epidemic into existence.

It’s not Reagan that’s the problem, it’s the insatiable sexual degeneracy of gay community that’s the problem.

Monkeypox proved it.

Anarcho-tyranny:  A stage of governmental dysfunction in which the state is anarchically hopeless at coping with large matters but ruthlessly tyrannical in the enforcement of small ones.

This is the definining characteristic of New York City and other Progressive urban hell holes.

Yesterday, a man rode around on a scooter, randomly shooting people.  He wounded three and killed one.

There were multiple shootings in NYC over the holiday weekend.

In NYC, shoplifting has gotten so bad that grocery stores are putting anti-theft devices on ice cream.

At the sane time, an army of the Waffen NYPD’s finest are arresting a white guy in a suit for having a cigarette on the sidewalk outside the Central Park wall, which technically makes it part of Central Park, which is a no smoking area, and not wanting to present ID.

You can literally shoot up heroin in Central Park, where the city provides free needle disposal, but if you smoke a cigarette, an entire precinct will mobilize to hassle you.

This is the hell the Left wants for the rest if America.