The main reason for the blank firing adapter is to keep the gas from escaping out the end of barrel so it can go back and cycle the bolt and load the next round.
A live fire exercise would be using live rounds, not blanks.
A live fire exercise would be using live rounds, not blanks.
And yet, the Alec Baldwin fiasco:
> Dave Halls, assistant director on the movie, told investigators he failed to inspect every round in every chamber of every gun on set. In his affidavit, Souza said the gun went off during rehearsal of a scene in which Baldwin, seated on a church pew, pulls his firearm from its holster and aims directly “towards the camera lens.”
> According to the Los Angeles Times, half a dozen union camera-crew workers had walked off set in protest of working conditions just hours before Hutchins was shot. There had been three misfires of the prop gun before the one that killed Hutchins. “There were no safety meetings,” an unnamed crew member said. “There was no assurance that it wouldn’t happen again. All they wanted to do was rush, rush, rush.” The Times reported that someone texted the production manager, “We’ve now had three accidental discharges. This is super unsafe.”
> But a huge cache of documents the bureau released after the report suggest Gutierrez-Reed may have known live rounds had been detected on set ahead of the fatal shooting. In published text messages, Rust’s prop master tells Gutierrez-Reed she found “bad ones” in the box of ammunition. “Hannah advised she thought it meant possibly one or two rounds from the box, but Sarah told her it was more than half of the box,” the summary reportedly read.
Lesson learned: if you want to engineer an on-set firearm accident, use faulty revolvers, heavily contaminate the supply of blanks with live ammunition, and make sure everyone is rushing through everything at all times so crew is conditioned to ignore warning signs and nobody knows who to blame when tragedy occurs.
Well played, Alec. Next time just do Springtime for Hitler.
> There had been three misfires of the prop gun before the one that killed Hutchins. … “We’ve now had three accidental discharges. This is super unsafe.”
A "misfire" is when the gun should go off but doesn't, an "accidental discharge" is when the gun shouldn't go off but does.
There was a lot of sloppy reporting around the events, to where it's hard to tell what the facts actually were. The particular mistake I highlighted (the reporter saying "misfire" when their source says "accidental discharge") IMO makes whichever article you're quoting suspect as a whole.
Edit to expand on that:
Various types of autoloading firearms rely on the gas from the combustion of the powder in the round to be directed a certain way which provides the energy needed to cycle the bolt, which includes ejecting the spent round and feeding the next round. If that gas escapes out the end of the barrel then that action doesn't happen and remedial action must be performed on the rifle (in the case of an AR style rifle it means working the charging handle). With a revolver (at least mine), the cylinder is spun using the energy from squeezing the trigger so it doesn't matter if the gas escapes out the end of the barrel. I'm not sure how safe that would be to use a blank firing adapter on a revolver if there's no other way for the gas to escape.