Alec Baldwin Urges Hollywood to Employ Police Officers on Film and TV Sets Using Real or Fake Guns https://t.co/ACwTsJMDP0
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) November 8, 2021
Like this guy?
Baldwin wants to transfer responsibility from an armorer to a cop.
That won’t prevent this from happening again.
The fundamental problem is transferring responsibility.
The guy with the gun in his hand always has the duty to check the weapon.
Always.
You are your own last line of defense.
I am my safety.
What is the root cause of the problem? Which error, had it been corrected, would have prevented this death?
No police? Might as well claim the drunk driving death happened because Elvis is dead. There is about as much cause and effect connection.
Here’s a tip: Stop trying to blame others, and take responsibility. As producer you allowed a completely unqualified individual to be your armorer. You did not insist in adequate safety measures. You delegated responsibility to individuals that were not taking that responsibility seriously.
Instead of blindly trusting your armorer and your AD, you could have checked the gun yourself. Or you could have watched your AD check the gun. Or your AD could have checked the gun when they picked it up. And, the armorer could have not allowed live rounds on the set. But… in your little peabrain, it was because there were no cops.
You forgot the two key causes:
Baldwin pointed the gun at people.
Baldwin pulled the trigger.
There’s a third. Baldwin had to cock the weapon too. It was a single action.
Three steps.
Clearly premeditaded.
As I understand it, rules for movie sets already state that only the armorer should hand a weapon to an actor on set, while demonstrating to the actor that the weapon is safe. According to what we’ve heard and read, an assistant director handed the gun to Baldwin, who accepted it from him(!). If they would hire substitute workers and an inexperienced armorer, and then bypass her, why wouldn’t they bypass new rules or a policeman next time they are behind schedule and under pressure? Baldwin was co-producer, and he was right there. Even if someone else had fired the shot, he has no standing to call for rules.
Alec Baldwin was a producer in name only. Another title in the credits for the money and publicity he brought to the movie production. He is not just another star don’t you know!
Sort of like F. Joe Biden is the President of the United States, even though we all know he is a senile dmented old man that is not even capable of managing his bodily functions, much less managing the Federal Government.
Hopefully his vanity producer credit will put him personally on the hook for any damages and lawyer bills above the insurance limits. He was the one person that pointed, cocked, and pulled the trigger on the gun he did not even attempt to check. .
According to Aesop, the rules mandated on set have resulted in three gunshot wounds in one or more generations, in an industry that had, what, millions? billions? of cinematic rounds discharged (just contemplate Saving Private Ryan, for simply one example).
And,unsurprisingly, when nearly every single rule was ignored, somebody got shot! And killed/critically injured!
So, when multiple jackwagons ignored proven-with-blood rules, somebody died, and somebody got choppered to trauma care. And, Baldwin’s answer is NOT to rededicate himself to rules that have an enviable safety record, but, to have an officer, more likely than not, NOT a gun guy, let alone an armorer, oversee things?
How can THAT end, other than well?
Aesop? Didnt he write fables? Kinda like baldwin, HE broke the rule. HE should pay. I have friends who have messed with firearms for decades. Even WE never assume a firearm is clear until we check it personally. First thing I learned when I was 6 years old. (58)now.
Congratulations on being only the 5,000th guy to use that “I am Spartacus” joke!
Henny Youngman’s legacy is safe.
Call me when you have so much as 5 minutes’ time on a production set.
YOU use actual firearms, as do most of us, so those rules matter anywhere else than on set, as they should.
Those same “rules” are beyond retarded on production, which is why they’re like the Pirate’s Code: really more guidelines, than actual rules.
Beginning with the shocking and seldom-known fact that Hollywood doesn’t use actual firearms on set (except when a few jackasses break every safety rule in existence).
So, in Hollywood, just as in real life, guns don’t kill people. Morons do.
There is NEVER supposed to be an actual weapon on any primary production set. (The only places they’re allowed to use them is on a second unit – this was not that – and even then, only on an actual firing range (which that studio is not, which is why reports that anyone was firing live rounds on breaks is so much bullshit, and hasn’t been substantiated by the sheriffs, nor anyone else, on the record, since five minutes after the news broke), or on a ship literally far out at sea and shooting over the side, with an actual by-God Rangemaster in total control of all firing, on top of the weapons handler/propmaster, and nobody downrange of the muzzle whatsoever.)
No LIVE AMMO anywhere near set either. Ever. For any reason. Period.
Any prop/weapons person who possesses live, blank, and dummy rounds is required to mark each type conspicuously and differently, and keep the live ammo securely locked up at all times, and the prop guns are not to be able to chamber live ammunition for any reason. Hence the term “prop gun”.
That’s how you have million of rounds fired on thousands of movies where everybody is shooting at each other, for days on end, and they don’t even get a scratch. (FTR, there were over 500 firing prop guns – out of 3000 total “weapons” – just for the Normandy Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan. Tens of thousands of rounds fired, actual demolition explosive effects going off on every take. Zero injuries, over days.) And that was 20+ years ago. Almost like Hollywood knows how to do this or something, without any input from the NRA, or any police.
(Sweet Suffering Shiva, it’s like suddenly nobody who uses a real gun ever saw a John Wick movie, ever. FFS).
Hire a cut-rate incompetent moron or two to be in charge of following those rules, and you kill people. This isn’t hard to suss out, even for the other fuckwits who work in Hollywood. They zeroed in on the correct source of the problem in about an hour, and it wasn’t Baldwin. But two weeks later, so-called “gun people” are still having their asses kicked by the concept.
Baldwin is reverting to type, and showing his middling double-digit IQ.
“Alec Baldwin said something stupid today.” Really? That headline is pretty much non-stop for 40+ years, when last I looked.
If you wouldn’t listen to him about the incident itself, why drag this jackass to the microphone now?
He’s not only beclowned himself times beyond number since long before this, he now has a body count. Someone – his manager, agent, anyone he’ll listen to… – needs to tell him that’s moved him to the “STFU, Forever” Category. For Life, With No Possibility Of Parole. Not just on guns. On Everything.
The less he talks, the smarter he sounds.
About anything he could think of.
Anyone who would take gun safety advice from sumbumblefuck who has already negligently shot and killed somebody should have their head examined…
Classic deflection- pretend there was some sort of shortcoming in the safety procedures to deflect from that fact that those procedures weren’t being followed at all.
I will grant that when shooting/rehearsing a scene that requires use of blanks the armorer and/or their second is the responsible party and the actor should not be expect to do any other kind of check. I will grant that Hollywood has an amazing safety record when it comes to shooting scenes where every single one of the four rules are violated. I will grant that Hollywood is the exception to Cooper’s rules WHEN FOLLOWING THEIR OWN.
That said, if AB was really just ‘practicing his draw’ as the most recent claim I saw stated, he SHOULD be expected to do at the least a visual check of the firearm to make sure it’s not loaded, and he SHOULD be expected to keep the damn thing pointed in a safe direction, and he SHOULD be expected to keep his fucking finger off the trigger.
NO NO NO.
If you are using a gun, YOU are responsible for what’s in it. Yes, the actor absolutely MUST do a check personally, since by every rule of gun safety we’re all taught, you’re NEVER allowed to assume that a gun is empty, or loaded with blanks, or whatever, just because someone else told you so.
Hollywood is NOT exempt from Cooper’s Four Laws. No one is. No one should ever pretend to be, and no one should ever suggest that anyone else is exempt.
If you read some of the industry trade magazine articles on armorer procedures that have been mentioned here in the past month or so, you will find that real armorers and real Hollywood crew and actors with functioning brains DO follow Cooper’s Four Laws.
No, you won’t.
You could look it up.
And probably ought to.
That said, your entire first paragraph renders your entire second paragraph moot.
For the 500th time, Baldwin was rehearsing a scene in the script, which both victims had read just like Baldwin, that specifically called for him to draw and fire at the camera. (“Rehearsing” means you actually do it over and over. I thought this was common knowledge.)
With a gun that wasn’t supposed to be a real gun, which was supposed to only have dummy rounds in it, which were supposed to be conspicuously marked as such, and which was supposed to have been checked by two people, including one specifically hired to ensure, beyond any doubt, and with a double-check verification, that all that was true, before ever putting the prop in Baldwin’s hand for the rehearsal. Not for nothing, but that, alone, is seven specific safety rule violations, and that’s just for openers.
Baldwin drawing the gun, cocking it, pointing it at the camera, and pulling the trigger, under the conditions given, was a total of zero violations of anything. He was doing his exact job. Sorry if that reality makes anyone’s corn flakes taste rather piss-flavored, or their heads just exploded, but there it is. And we’ve all yet to hear if the fatal incident happened on the first such run-through, or the sixth, or anywhere in between.)
Which multiple violations is how the exact weapon person managed to violate not one, but every single one, of the black-letter explicit requirements for firearms and ammunition safety on productions.
So, when Baldwin sees dummy rounds exactly where they’re supposed to be, but one of them isn’t a dummy round, but such that neither of the other two people could tell the difference between rounds either, and having already overlooked the rule against live weapons even being present, so he’s now playing Russian Roulette unbeknownst to anyone on the planet, kindly explain how you would have done it differently, and what superpower you would have used, under the exact same conditions, involving nothing but your eyeballs, to correctly suss out the problem(s), and save a life.
Any deviation from those conditions (including pulling an Alternate Reality out of one’s underpants) is a no-go at this station.
Or, you can tap out, and blame the armorer (and her incompetent AD acting as second set of eyes) for her 57 explicit fuck-ups, no penalty.
Which, I earnestly hope, is probably exactly how the Santa Fe D.A. comes down, some one of these days, at least if she wants to win the case, probably with a plea bargain and no court room time, without even leaving her office.
And I say that while holding idiot Baldwin in more contempt that you can probably imagine, but knowing that, apart from some extraordinary and unheard-of development, he’s simply got no criminal culpability for what happened, in any universe running on oxygen, instead of hopeium and crack cocaine.
If anyone would like to pioneer a $70,000,000,000 industry where the rules are completely different, I applaud your efforts, and look forward to your first products therefrom.
In the meantime, maybe stop beating the horse.
It was dead nearly 10 days ago, and now there’s not even molecules of horse left to thwack at.
From this trade magazine article: https://ascmag.com/blog/filmmakers-forum/filming-with-firearms
One of the highlights was teaming with cinematographer James Glennon, ASC and actor Robin Williams on the 2005 film The Big White. During shooting, I was fortunate to become friends with both — and I quickly found out that beneath the humor, Robin Williams never missed a detail.
Many of our scenes involved a revolver. Every day I would show him the empty firearm, load six dummy cartridges into the chambers so it looked fully loaded to camera, and demonstrate that it was completely safe by pointing it in a safe direction and pulling the trigger eight times.
That seems like a reasonable interpretation of Cooper’s first law to me. And it is trivial for actors to follow this procedure. And clearly none of Baldwin’s crew, himself in particular, had enough competence to operate this way.
This is why I spoke of standard procedures that honor Cooper’s laws.
Enough of Baldwin. What’s funnier here is the video.
“I’m the only one in this room competent to hold this firearm” BLAM!
Apparently, not.
I have seen that particular YT video many times, and immediately thought of it again when I read the tweet that Baldwin wanted a LEO on set to handle the firearms.
Many years ago, I had the pleasure of working with a friend who was responsible for firearms qualification for law enforcement. Many officers only fire their weapons during the qualifications they must pass on a yearly or semi-annual basis. It quickly became apparent that some of them are just not gun people. I witnessed many safety violations and several negligent discharges by officers attempting to qualify on the range. They were quickly and aggressively reprimanded. At least two were stripped of their weapons and sent back for remedial training before they could carry again.
Being a cop does NOT mean they are a firearms expert.
Typical magical thinking and evasion of responsibility plus the usual bipolar view of police as ACAB unless they are serving a Leftist purpose.