They did indeed have problems with people getting killed. That's why the stunt was to be done with models until it was shown it could be done safely.
We're all adults and can make our own choices. Few things in life are free of risk (you drive a car I imagine). If I want to do a damn stunt I'll do it. Should we also ban most sports? Those are dangerous too. How about we stop building tall buildings? Lots of construction accidents there.
Also, the kind of accident that happened recently on set is vanishingly rare. There are a ton of safguards in place to ensure things like that don't happen and, in this case, at least one person was severely negligent.
Beyond that, there can be many reasons; for example, in a similar situation with Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afS5ks54tms
1) It's fun
2) Interesting to work on for the director and the crew. If this was shot with a digital screen and a fan, that'd super be boring to produce.
3) Brings good marketing
4) Can justify paying expensive advisors / raising more production money (these stunts are difficult to financially evaluate so they can funnel out budget easily)
5) It looks more realistic (though it's not necessary a quality, as the story-telling is sometimes more important than realism).
It's the exact opposite situation from what you describe, which is why it has been newsworthy. But I don't understand how your takeaway became the opposite of the described reality.
I would be interested in seeing the numbers on prop guns fired in filming vs injuries. I expect it is enormous. The risks are simple, understood, easy to prevent.
Many of the risks in drug development are largely unknowable before human testing and we still use human subjects.
I had a boss try to bring this up at lunch last week. "I was watching an old western and they have prop guns everywhere, how come no one died back then?" Pulling up a Wikipedia[0] listing on movie accidents brought up quite a lot of old western and war movie accidents.
Although it seems vastly more animals got hurt on set than people. A lot of early war/western movies seemed to be extremely detrimental to horses used on set.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_and_television_ac...
What is the difference between bringing something up and trying to bring something up?
NPr states the last prop gun death was Brandon Lee in 1993, so ~30 years ago. I still wonder how many movie blanks are fired a year. 1 million? 10 million?
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/22/1048295916/props-gun-death-in...
The primary means western propaganda uses is to persuade. It has to be persuasive because the targets can choose whether they believe it or not. Nobody has to comply, and dissenting voices and alternative narratives are available. Also it competes in a market for ideas and so there's a degree of selective pressure to improve so you're quite right it has become quite sophisticated whereas authoritarian propaganda can rely on excluding dissenting voices.
Soviet and Chinese propaganda, at least the types you're taking about, persuade by projecting power. It's about psychological domination, with heroic poses and strong simple messages emphasising the inevitability and necessity of party control. It's blunt design is part of the point. Thousands of gymnasts and marchers in perfect lockstep. Zero individuality. It doesn't matter if you are persuaded, as long as you get the message that you have no choice but to comply, and look, everyone else is complying!
Take the poisoning of Navalny. They don't need to persuade anybody in Russia that the state didn't do it. Everybody knows the state did it, even those that are pro-state. The point is to send the message, this is what will happen to you if you push us too far.
I don't think Fred Hampton was persuaded as you describe.
Or just don't worry about it. I have many unpopular opinions and posts :-)