On Alec Baldwin’s Shooting
schneier.com
schneier.com
> I don’t know the details of the case, nor the intricacies of the law, but I have a question about movie props.
I found nothing of substance to this post.
Why should you treat a gun when you shoot a movie any differently?
If Alec's case goes in front of a jury, a lot of people in this country are familiar with how to handle a gun, and they won't give him a pass.
Making sure props are safe to use in a scene is just not an actor's job on set.
But, it boils down tk the only argument against the rule that anyone handling a firearm is responsible for awareness of its condition is that on-set processses have been set up by the responsible authorities in a way which makes that impractical, which would shift the responsibility to those authorities—which, apparently, in this case is (or at a minimum includes) Baldwin in his role as Executive Producer.
An actor's job is acting. That's basically it. There are lots of things on set that could be dangerous (horses, knives, furniture, electrical wires, forklifts, etc.) and it's the crew's job to make sure that the dangerous stuff is not dangerous when the actor is shooting a scene, or that the actor is carefully briefed on how to use the thing safely. In this case, "cold gun" was the crew briefing him -- telling him the gun could be used because it had no live ammo.
Executive Producer (and producer) means a wide variety of different things, and there are frequently many with different substantive roles on any given production; but the accounts I’ve seen of Baldwin’s specific role as EP on this production, not a general inference from the scope of what the title usually means or can mean, was the basis of the description.
EDIT: In any case, per protocols nominally in place for the production, as an actor he was supposed to have inspected the firearm and ammunition with the armorer. There are different accounts over the exact narrative around how that didn't happen, but none of them that I’ve seen appear to be exonerative to Baldwin.
The pre-existing warnings about gun safety issues and the walkoff of the union crew and their replacement by scabs? Yeah, whoever's responsible for that workplace is extremely liable.
He picked up a loaded revolver, pointed it at another human being, and pulled the trigger. That other human being is now dead as a consequence of his actions. Even if he didn’t know it was loaded, which seems likely, there was no excuse for him pulling the trigger.
Yes, though it is a small minority and seems mostly like some sort of conspiracy theory.
> Every account I've read has the armorer loading it. Curious to read other versions though.
The thought is that Baldwin did load the real bullets because there was all the drama going on with the crew walkout so he killed a person he thought was involved. It seems a bit out there, but that is why we need to understand why he had real bullets. As far as I know he had no need to be in possession of them during the shooting.
The better analogy would be if he got into a running car, released the parking brake, and slammed on the accelerator while someone was standing in front of the car because someone told him the car was in neutral and he didn’t bother to check.
If there's reason to believe that (a) Baldwin had been trained to determine whether the gun was loaded with live ammunition and (b) that was his responsibility on set, then he's definitely at fault. I'd be curious to read any claims to that effect. What I've read is that the person who was qualified to and responsible for determining if the gun was loaded with live ammo said the gun was not loaded with live ammo.
Nobody is expecting him to be an expert in either, just to have the basic knowledge necessary to safely use the thing.
> If there's reason to believe that (a) Baldwin had been trained to determine whether the gun was loaded with live ammunition and (b) that was his responsibility on set
If he couldn’t determine whether the gun was loaded, he should assume that it was loaded. That’s literally the first rule of gun safety, and nobody should even touch a gun without knowing that much. The second rule is not to point it at anything you aren’t willing to shoot, the third rule is to keep your finger clear of the trigger until you’re ready to fire, and the fourth rule is to be sure of your target and what’s behind it. Baldwin literally violated all four of these rules. There wasn’t any sort of arcane, expert knowledge he was missing here. He didn’t even have to know how to check if the gun was loaded if he knew to keep his booger hook off the bang switch.
Look, I’m sorry if you’re a big Alec Baldwin fan for some reason. Sometimes people we like do things that are awful or criminally negligent and part of the grieving process is to try and rationalize why it wasn’t really their fault. But in this particular incident, there was absolutely no need for Baldwin to have his finger on the trigger, and if you set aside all the other production issues, the physical act of pulling the trigger was his responsibility and his alone.
Baldwin seems like he's personally kind of an asshole, but I find it pretty weird that a bunch of gun hobbyists think they understand how movie productions work. Like, this isn't you and your buddies at the gun range. There are paid professionals whose responsibility it is to keep things safe on set. To the extent that Baldwin being an asshole matters, it's if he was making life difficult for the armorer somehow when the cameras weren't rolling, not the way he acted out the scene where the gun went off.
That's irrelevant in this case; Baldwin was just blocking out a camera angle. There was absolutely no need for him to touch the trigger in this incident.
It doesn't make much of a difference in this case how Hollywood productions handle firearms in general because in the vast majority of those Hollywood productions, nobody gets shot to death on set. I would hope that this incident leads to an industry-wide improvement in safety standards, just like the death of Brandon Lee or the on-set deaths during the production of the Twilight Zone movie.
> I find it pretty weird that a bunch of gun hobbyists think they understand how movie productions work.
As a "gun hobbyist", I find it pretty weird that a professional actor who is paid millions of dollars to handle firearms on a movie set could behave so recklessly. I don't care about Baldwin being an "asshole"; I care about him killing another human being through criminal negligence. Why are you making excuses for him?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/alec-baldw...
Armorer: When the armorer wakes up in the morning, those guns and the ammunition should be under lock and key. Everything should have been inventoried the night before. They look at their call sheet; they know what they need. They’ll normally have a cart that has the weapons for that particular scene locked up with keys that only they have on their person. They’ll transport them to set when they’re called to set. They’ll open up those cases. For a rehearsal, a lot of times, they will bring out the guns. Now, a lot of times you can do a rehearsal without guns.
Interviewer: Baldwin was rehearsing when this happened, right?
Armorer: Right. But the thing is, if they had not used them in rehearsal and then used them in the actual scene, would he have shot her then? Who knows? But it’s just another layer of protection that’s put in place.
Armorer (ctd): When you’re ready to go, the actors stand on their marks. Firearms are called in. The armorer will walk in with the firearms and put them in the actor’s hands. If they need to fire the guns, the armorer will chamber a round into whatever gun needs to be fired. And he will say “This weapon is hot” right to the actor’s face. Of course, this is after your typical safety briefings that they have every single day and before every single scene is shot with firearms, to let everyone know that firearms are on set.
(later in the interview)
Armorer: So first of all, if the assistant director was the one who handed him the pistol, there was no professional involved who knew anything about firearms. So that’s hugely concerning.
Armorer (ctd): Baldwin has been doing this long enough. He’s been in a lot of movies, action movies and things like that. If someone hands him a gun, what’s stopping him from looking down and looking through that chamber and saying, “Oh, I got rounds in here”? “Why are we dealing with rounds? Are they dummy rounds? Can I inspect the dummy rounds myself?" He’s totally okay to ask that.
https://www.vox.com/culture/23562397/rust-shooting-alec-bald...
> "He also had a duty to make sure that the set was safe and we know from our investigation that there had been accidental misfires prior to this."
https://www.kcra.com/article/alec-baldwin-rust-charges-why/4...
Why would you even have live rounds on set?
If you did this, and then fired a live round in the gun, it could injure or kill the person holding the gun or someone nearby.
> Why would you even have live rounds on set?
I cannot imagine there's any acceptable reason to have live rounds on set, and it seems like whoever put live rounds on this movie set should have some explaining to do, at the very least.
All the more reason to be careful how you load it, then.
Jamming a gun barrel so the bullet can't leave the chamber isn't a method of making a gun safe.
I'm going to guess "because america"
But at least if somebody did put a live round in it, it would not be a death sentence for whoever it was pointed at. As on a movie set, the prop is only ever touched by the armorer and the actor who uses it (who is not supposed to open it unless it's called for in the script).
You can't have a non-lethal gun that looks like a lethal one because the cops will shoot you.
Once it looks different, they don't want it in a movie.
A single cartridge of .38 Special—a fairly typical revolver round—can give a projectile around 350J of kinetic energy. 9mm Luger is around 475J. A small rifle round like 5.56x45mm can give a projectile around 1750J of kinetic energy. This is just a fraction of the total energy, which comes out as recoil, operating the gun itself, and lots of heat. So the total chemical energy is probably at least double that. Now, you don’t if want to actually propel projectiles, you can go back to saving half of the energy again, but that just gets us back to the original number.
Now let’s assume you’re going to replace the ammunition source with a battery. Batteries are slow to charge and guns are designed to have replaceable magazines so this would work for most gun types. A six round revolver cylinder would need about 2100J while a standard 15 round Glock 19 magazine would need about 7125J and a standard 30 round AR-15 magazine would need 52,500J.
An iPhone 14 battery stores about 12.68 Watt-hours, which is over 45,000J. So far, so good. But you still wouldn’t be able to eject brass (because the brass would need to go where the battery goes), and you’d need some sort of electric piston to sit in the chamber and produce the “recoil”.
Of course, this still wouldn’t prevent someone from loading a real magazine or cylinder with live rounds, which means this wouldn’t have prevented this incident.
> Of course, this still wouldn’t prevent someone from loading a real magazine or cylinder with live rounds, which means this wouldn’t have prevented this incident.
It would, because any gun on a set would no longer need its firing pin.
Similarly it don't matter how many times people have had "firearm safety" explained to them, if they'll insist on pointing a firearm at someone and pulling the trigger.
That is the failure that matters here. That is the action that should not have been performed even if the gun was a lump of rubber.