This is a stupid take and was when you first made it.
We can discuss it in P&R if you want, but not here.
I like you, even if we often disagree on things, but this isn’t the place for it and you’re being extra aggravating about it.
If you are going to hand someone a gun to use on set, why shouldn’t you face the same risks as everyone else?
You argument is that the armorer shouldn’t have to be burdened by the same risks that everyone else on set is burdened with, and that strikes me as gross hypocrisy.
If your pointing guns at people and pulling triggers, that’s far and above the risks that should be happening on the set.
Your argument is that rather than minimizing risks we should maximize and expand them to everyone possible.
That’s dumb.
Edit: We’ve covered how responsible productions handle shots with firearms on sets and I can’t be bothered to find them all again. But they’re not pointing guns are people willy-nilly at point blank and pulling triggers. This is strongly established in this thread from interviews with armorers in the industry. You’re basing your supposition off of something that should never happen and saying that it’s a thing that should happen. That’s dumb.
Everyone? No, just one person. The armorer. The person responsible for the weapon and making the claim that the weapon is safe.
If the armorer can’t be certain that a gun is empty, why would they hand it to anyone on set?
And if they can be certain the gun is empty, then there should be no issues. The armorer could always aim the gun a few times, and pull the trigger a few dozen times before handing it off.
And honestly if you can’t every make guns safe on set, then yeah, maybe there should not be any guns on set at all. Ever. And we should spread that rule to all parts of life. We would all be better off.
@legowarrior, as someone who shares your disdain for guns and is often tempted to extend it to gunowners, I would encourage you to check out this thread. You’ll find a lot of folks like Shiva articulating themselves from a more personal rather than political perspective, and especially a great post from him in which he explains why he would have a gun at his desk right now.
-Tom
Yes, freedom is dangerous.
Said the guy who raped his slaves.
Peaceful slavery…
I followed it @tomchick. I just don’t have any empathy left for gun owners after Sandy Hook.
And then, it continues to happen.
So, I just don’t want to comment on that thread more then I have already. Nothing constructive can come from it especially when people really open up about their feelings. That just isn’t fair to them or anyone.
Fair enough; the details of film production are not something I always keep current on.
It sounds like Hollywood is already going in the direction I suggested, replacing the inherently risky (as mandated by physics) use of real guns to CGI or to different choices of shots (suggesting the target as opposed to showing aiming, etc.) So that’s good.
The bigger picture here is that despite all the kerfuffle about guns, is that this is really an issue of workplace safety. It sounds to me like this particular production had a serious problem in that regard. The armorer is IMO likely to be found criminally negligent and the production as a whole was almost certainly at least civil-y negligent. As to Baldwin, I think the details matter. I think it’s unlikely that his conduct rose to the level of criminal negligence but there’s possibility (maybe even a probability) that he acted with simple negligence. It’s also possible he’s not at fault at all, but IMO that business with “I just dropped the hammer but I didn’t pull the trigger” displays a certain level of ignorance of safe working conditions (in the context of working with a gun). Also, if Baldwin as a producer was responsible in full or in part for the overall lack of safe working conditions, then he should be found liable for that as well.
In the bigger picture, this is a good example of why Hollywood is right to move away from the use of real guns.
I am curious though - given the vast growth of production in many different parts of the world, with presumably lower production budgets in many cases, how safe are all of those non-US productions being about guns? Or maybe they just don’t use real guns at and go straight for the CGI b/c those places are not 'Murica?
You can often shoot around it to some extent. Cutaways and angles to give the impression that guns are pointed places they aren’t actually pointed.
I suspect the rules are similar a lot of places or you’re talking some Bollywood production where verisimilitude isn’t really on the table anyway. But even there they use quite a lot of real firearms.
Well, my understanding is that it was done the way it was specifically for a shot, so he was pointing it where he was told to. Is this no longer current?
Yes, that does seem like a somewhat dumb thing to have done and an even dumber thing to say as though it is somehow exculpatory. Unless it was also somehow part of the shot.
I meant after the shot. Without seeing footage or having a floorplan it’s hard to say what happened exactly, but the gun was pointed at people, which shouldn’t have been a thing according to basically every Hollywood armorer that’s talked about this since it happened.
Now was the shot safe and then after the shot Baldwin swept them with the muzzle as he released the hammer? Maybe. Or was the shot unsafe and he just released the hammer which still was pointed at the camera with people crowded around it? This seems more likely to me.
Of course it was supposed to be a cold gun so odds are they figured sitting around in front of it was fine.
Ultimately it always comes back to chain of custody of the gun. Baldwin could’ve done things to avoid the event, but he was the last point of failure and it’s not, imo, very reasonable to expect him to have done it. Dozens of things went horribly wrong long before he released that hammer. Part of me thinks that I would’ve aimed the gun at the ground before letting the hammer go, but hindsight is 20/20 especially for someone who wasn’t in his position.
It was after the shot according to what he said as I understood it. Shot was over, so he let go of the hammer, but seems to have still been aiming it at people. Which is mechanically same as pulling the trigger really, which made his statement so strange to me.
It’s, naturally, where all his enemies have decided to go on the whole “if he was a gun guy this wouldn’t have happened” bullshit speculation spree. Like gun people don’t do this sort of shit every day.
That said, I doubt Will Smith would’ve had this problem. But not everyone is Will Smith (though maybe they should be if they’re going to handle guns).
Will and other actors are hired to ACT and take direction. This is why they created the armorer position, to manage the set, manage ‘prop weapons’ which are a mix of life-like weapons and real weapons with special configuration/handling. Everyone is saying Baldwin should have checked his gun for what? Was he or anyone other than the armorer training to tell the difference between a dummy and a live round? Is the average person trained to identify an obstruction in a blank? Not according to insurance companies. A lot of what applies at a range does NOT apply on set.
How Hollywood has it set up is the actor takes direction from the Armorer like they are trained to do. they usually have multiple safety meets to review safety processes before and during production so the entire cast and crew are on the same page on how to be safe and are expected to follow this to the letter.
When you really think about it, this falls directly on the producers, whichever ones that made the call to hire this unseasoned armorer, and the ones that hid the previous misfires INCLUDING the previous incident with LIVE ammunition with Baldwins double! THAT should have been a instant show stopper! That they kept going and didnt inform the crew or production company is near criminal! Actually, probably WAS criminal!
If Baldwin is part of that chain, he should go to prison. If other producers left him out knowing he is triggered by weapons issues in general, then it should serve as a wake-up to him to not take producer credit in the future unless he actually wants the responsibility and owns it.
Agreed.
There needs to be a system where people can pull the plug on a production until this sort of thing gets fixed. But of course Hollywood is politics so anyone doing this would end up black listed because they cost people money and made them look bad.
But a system needs to exist. Even a system where someone with a concern can anonymously (or semi-anonymously) report to someone and have an inspector come down to the set unannounced and do a check or the like. Something better than “whatever the producers and DAs wouldn’t let this happen” followed by “I can’t believe this happened after we left people with a monied conflict of interest in charge of preventing it!”
Would not the whistle blower protection laws be what you are talking about. I do not know exactly how it would work IANAL, but if there were safety violations especially ones concerning the firing of live ammo, I would think that it would fall under this. Of course, people do not file whistler blower type complaints often and I am guessing that the industry wide fear of being black balled makes it even less likely in a Hollywood setting but the mechanism is there.
Well the thing was, people tried to stop the production and… nothing happened. They walked off the set.
Then the same day someone died.
When it comes to this sort of safety issue there, imo, needs to be a more robust system than “complain to someone and nothing happens or it takes forever for anyone to get around to it”.
Edit: I’ve seen a lot of people suggest that Armory be divested completely from props and given it’s own autonomy, but in this case that wouldn’t have done anything because the armorer was likely the problem. There needs to be a fast and effective method for someone to do an end run around a bad armorer/production team.
Has it been reported if this production was a union shoot or a wildcat shoot? Typically in Hollywood one of the significant safety valves for workplace safety are the unions who take safety seriously and have mechanisms for reporting safety issues and filing grievances. If this was a low budget wildcat shoot that would explain a lot imo. Do we know?
Yes, the union disavowed any knowledge or responsibility almost immediately.
Does that mean it was a non union shoot? If so that goes a long way to explaining the mess.
All I really know is that they said they weren’t involved. Maybe their people were among those who walked off.