Alec Baldwin was given loaded weapon and told it was safe, court records show | Hacker News Reader

Alec Baldwin was given loaded weapon and told it was safe, court records show

theguardian.com

10 pointsneverminder9 comments

Im on board with blanks and special safety measures for the sake of SFX. But, what reason would there be for having live rounds in firearms on a movie set?

Couldn't you ban this shit at the door and clean room it? Wouldn't this have been the initial reaction for prior incidents?

It’s the reason you’re taught to treat all firearms as if they are loaded until you’ve confirmed they’re not. It’s easy to lose track of what is and isn’t loaded and what it’s loaded with. Doubly so in a chaotic and fast moving environment like a movie set. Then throw in real guns that the person providing has doing double duty and the chances of an accident go right up unless people are careful about their gun handling.

Even with defence in depth like you suggest where you properly isolate the guns and keep all live ammo away there still should be no excuse for not properly checking the condition of a weapon before using it.

In particular the handling rules are setup so if you accidentally break one or two no one should get hurt. In this case they were deliberately breaking several so only needed to neglect one and tragedy results.

It’s not clear yet what happened, but I believe in movie set parlance, “live” would include blanks.

My mother always told me, don’t point a gun at someone until and unless you want to kill them.

Pop the mag, rack the slide, check the chamber. If crews knew about this one secret 3 second trick, lives could have been saved.

Hypothetically if I became an actor tomorrow and were handed a "prop gun" for a scene, is it actually as simple as you make it sound to "check the chamber"?

The only guns I've ever held were shotguns for a couple of clay shooting sessions, and was told very firmly to never look into the barrel and to never point it at anything that it wouldn't be OK to accidentally shoot, even when cocked (don't think cocked is the right term here? In the non-straight form with an angle at the hinge exposing the middle of the gun)

But of course, "never point it at a person regardless of whether you believe it to be empty" doesn't work if an acting part requires you to... point it at a person.

Frankly (and not that I have any plans or dreams of being an actor), having read this story, if I were ever asked to point a gun at someone for a photo/video I'd just refuse unless I could first get actual firearms training to be safe, even if I were only due to hold a prop.

Point the gun to the ground. You pull the slide back, which exposes the chamber. You can plainly make out whether there's something in it or not, and see if the cartridges are blanks or have bullets. Same thing goes for revolvers, you can just pop the cylinder and pull out a few rounds.

Yeah, because semi-autos are what they use in Westerns

Why were they using an actual live firearm to begin with? Could there not be a special effects device that looks, sounds, and mimics a firearm, without actually having to load cartridges?

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