Unless the judge has some knowledge that Baldwin either had intent, or was negligent in such a way as to contribute to the death, I’m not seeing what purpose it would serve to have him stand trial. He must feel absolutely terrible as it is, and my understanding is that it was not at all his fault.
Typically, there needs to be enough evidence for an indictment to stand trial. So far, there hasn’t been publicly released enough evidence to show that he was in anyway at fault.
Well he already has been indicted by a grand jury. And the standard for them is probable cause, which is a very low bar. Just that he held a gun when it went off and struck someone should meet that for manslaughter.
Well that’s not the argument you were making. He’s regrettably met the minimum standards for it to go to a proper court, though.
I don’t think it’s heavy-handed to think an incident can have multiple parties responsible. It’s very possibly that. I think a jury should determine if Baldwin legally should’ve done better, using evidence and witness testimony about what would normally happen.
Personally I think it’s much more the armorer’s fault. I agree with you. But I wasn’t there, I don’t know that we have all the information, or even that the information I’ve learned is completely accurate. A trial is the way to get all the information and certify it as true under penalty of perjury. Then the people who have been given every fact from both sides can make that determination.
it kinda is, although it would be fair to say i was being circumspect.
I don’t think it’s heavy-handed to think an incident can have multiple parties responsible. It’s very possibly that. I think a jury should determine if Baldwin legally should’ve done better, using evidence and witness testimony about what would normally happen.
i agree that multiple parties can be responsible for a thing, but i really feel these questions should have been adequately answered (and have) during the investigations. unless there’s a pile of evidence that hasn’t been made public (which is possible, i admit), then this all seems like so much theater.
you raise good points though, and i realize that we’re debating opinions here, not strictly the facts, so i’m not really trying to convince you of anything-- just to express my position.
Employers cut corners all the time to increase production or profit. They should be held accountable if their decision directly leads to someone’s death.
He had a hand in choosing the armorer. His employees were using the firearms on set for recreational shooting with live ammo. We don’t know if he knew that, but if he did then he’s responsible for not firing the armorer for a gross breach of safety. He was at least partially responsible for that and should face consequences for it.
And anyone who touches a gun should not just believe what someone says about it. That’s literally rule 1 of guns: they’re all loaded until proven otherwise by the person holding it. There’s many people whose friend handed them a gun to look at and promised it’s unloaded, only to ventilate said friend or an innocent bystander. Whoever has a gun is responsible for that gun, it’s a big responsibility but not a hard one. Guns are not mystical objects, it takes like half an hour to learn how basically every firearm made in the past 150 years works, and how to check if all of them are safe. You’re not flying a plane when you have a revolver in your hand. He was handed a gun, told it was safe, did nothing to verify that, and shot a woman because of it. If it happened to me and I killed my friend or wife, I’d already be in jail. But because it happened on a movie set, it’s suddenly a big question about who was responsible.
I have friends who own a lot of guns. I’ve held a lot of other people’s guns. As soon as it’s in your hands, it’s your responsibility. Doesn’t matter if we just got back from the FFL and it’s fresh out of the box. Doesn’t matter if there’s no bullets of that caliber anywhere on the property. Doesn’t fucking matter if someone you consider to be an expert hands you a weapon and tells you it’s clear. When a gun touches your hand, you are responsible for it and everything it can do. You take the 3 seconds it takes to clear it yourself and ask any questions that come up. If he had just looked at the gun and asked “why are their bullets in here” and “why don’t the bullets look like they’re props” then Halyna Hutchins would still be alive.
That’s basically what manslaughter is for. Times when someone dies unintentionally, but there’s proof that someone’s actions created that circumstance.
For context another manslaughter charge that stuck in film is the case of Sarah Jones who was run down by a train trying to rescue equipment off a tressle track that the company wasn’t properly cleared to work on. Three people took the hit in that case. Two out of three Executive Producers and the First Assistant Director (a position that serves as the on set safety veto) were charged and received prison sentences in that case.
It is also known that the Rust production had fielded massive concerns from crew regarding gun safety on set in the days before the accident when Baldwin’s stunt double fired two live rounds from a firearm that was not properly checked or cleared and called “cold” on handoff. He just didn’t hit anybody.
This production literally had a full dry run of the fatal incident with Baldwin’s stunt double. Everything from the handoff to the call of “cold gun” was duplicated on the day of the fatal event. That the Stunt double incident didn’t cause a full stop and inquiry with a massive change of protocols to the industry’s best practice Brandon Lee standard is utterly baffling. The whole situation really is a rare and particularly damning senario of extreme negligence on behalf of production and when the negligence pie gets that big it will surprise you who gets a slice.
The purpose is to prosecute him for the crime he has been charged with. That charge is Involuntary manslaughter, which explicitly means he was negligent in a way that lead to the death of another person. The purpose of having him(or literally anyone) stand trial in the American justice system is (supposed) to examine the evidence and determine if it supports the charges against the (presumed innocent) defendant. You don’t get let off the hook for your mistakes just because you ‘feel absolutely terrible’ about it. Your understanding of fault in this situation is incorrect.
true, most of the blame goes to dumbass negligent idiot who didnt care to do her armourer job and check for live ammo at any point (and probably brought that shit to the set)
and now its about if baldwins trigger pull and bad management is sentence worthy
Involuntary manslaughter is the killing of a human being without intent of doing so, either expressed or implied. It is distinguished from voluntary manslaughter by the absence of intention. It is normally divided into two categories, constructive manslaughter and criminally negligent manslaughter.
Criminally negligent manslaughter is variously referred to as criminally negligent homicide in the United States, and gross negligence manslaughter in England and Wales. In Scotland and some Commonwealth of Nations jurisdictions the offence of culpable homicide might apply.
It occurs where death results from serious negligence, or, in some jurisdictions, serious recklessness. A high degree of negligence is required to warrant criminal liability. A related concept is that of willful blindness, which is where a defendant intentionally puts themselves in a position where they will be unaware of facts which would render them liable.
Criminally negligent manslaughter occurs where there is an omission to act when there is a duty to do so, or a failure to perform a duty owed, which leads to a death. The existence of the duty is essential because the law does not impose criminal liability for a failure to act unless a specific duty is owed to the victim. It is most common in the case of professionals who are grossly negligent in the course of their employment. An example is where a doctor fails to notice a patient’s oxygen supply has disconnected and the patient dies (R v Adomako and R v Perreau). Another example could be leaving a child locked in a car on a hot day.
He was negligent but not in his position as the actor holding the weapon. My understanding is he is partly responsible for deciding to choose a non-union safety team that lead to the death.
Actually… Both. In regular Firearm handoff protocols Actors have a responsibility to uphold on their end. If everything is done to spec it is impossible to fire a live round from a firearm. Some small obstruction in the barrel getting missed and propelled might be in the realm of reasonable but part of the process of handoff requires a mini briefing on handoff of the weapon where each round is checked over where the actor can see and only authorized people are allowed to handle weapons at all. Been standard since the Brandon Lee death on “The Crow”.
Baldwin took the gun from a person on set whom everyone would have known wasn’t supposed to be handling it and didn’t insist on a check. In our industry actors are briefed every time they accept a role that it is their partial responsibility to make sure those checks are done because it is not just a safety thing, it’s a liability issue if you harm someone. If a check is missed as an actor you are supposed to flag it and refuse the unsafe handoff to clear you of any potential liability or after the fact regrets…
Thing is this protocol has ever been throughly tested in a court setting. The last time anyone was killed by a bullet on a set was the cause of the massive change to the industry standard protocol in a mass concerted effort to do a “never again” style pledge which basically worked for 30 years straight. The other notable gun death was an actor who killed himself with a blank by pointing the gun at his own noggin and pulling the trigger which which was something he was expressly not supposed to do for a scene, he just did it on his own without anybody’s sign off.
This industry sea change in part is designed to exonerate Productions from negligence charges like what happened on The Crow but it also made it one of the most well respected industry protocols as the Lee death basically became one of the industry’s cautionary tale that lingers being retold to each new generation of crew. While non-union sets tend to be less regimented it is known fact that concerns of gun safety issues were already flagged and bought to production by the concerned Rust crew and no motion was made to change. Potentially Baldwin as part of a group may have directly ignored further appeals to firearm related safety prior to the shooting. This isn’t the Brandon Lee situation over again - the industry now is a whole new ball game.
(Edit : Forgot to mention that the Rust crew had almost a full beat for beat dry run of the incident a few days before the incident where Baldwin’s stunt double discharged two live rounds after being handed a gun that he was told was “cold”… How one ignores that kind of wake up call I’ll never know.)
I read some more comments and I agree, I was too easy to convince that the actor doesn’t bear responsibility.
I also liked another comment just discussing that it was a real gun, regardless of on set or off. Like anyone else handling a firearm in any other situation, the actor holding it is responsible for checking if it is loaded before pulling the trigger and for ensuring nobody is in the path of any bullet.
It be like that. As a person with my first decade of union/non union film now under my belt and trying for the shop steward program I find it really difficult to convey to people just how stunningly bad the praxis on the Rust set appears from an insider perspective. It’s really difficult because people don’t understand how regimented the safety protocols in film are and how ubiquitous certain ones really are. It’s also hard for people to really grock power dynamics on a set. Like there have been people who have been banished instantly from set for being in an actor of Baldwin’s power positions eyeline. Any regular crew would have risked their jobs to try and appeal directly to Baldwin to be safer and this was the year after film was halted for upwards of 8 months due to covid and was slow to come back. There were a lot of desperate people in film trying to make back the debts they incurred by the unexpected famine.
People have been sentanced to prison on manslaughter charges in film for a lot less than what happened on Rust.
Why do they even use real weapons for those kinds of shots? I fell like a high quality fake would be indistinguishable on screen but not even give the opportunity for something like this to happen except for the actor being given the absolute wrong prop.
More or less because the blanks give a more realistic recoil and the smoke whisps which saves on time and processing in post and you can see if the action works in real time on review… and there are arguements that handling the real deal does actually add to the performance…
But like the standard done properly makes it incredibly difficult for injuries from weapons to occur. Consider that in 30 years the gun deaths in film plunged to almost zero *. There is way more production out there then there used to be and every scene where you see a gun being fired that is usually not one take and those takes were repeated over and over again. That’s tens of thousands of safe handles over the years.
I don’t have any issues with sets having or deciding to not have real guns but the real thing is that on a set that is doing the standard every weapon from barely looking like a gun at all rubber replica to projectiless gas powered airsoft gun are all treated as though they were real. When they are handed over you have to be shown exactly what they are and replica or not they can never be left unsupervised. They are always in authorized hands or locked up.
It’s part of why this case is so important. Anyone with money can make a non-union film. The best practices transcend union borders because accidents made from cupidity and negligence should have consequences. You ignore the warnings then the consequences are yours. The discourse often frames this as a personal issue but it’s a systemic one. Showing producers that being safe is a sometimes food is a dangerous precedent because the power they have over people is no joke.
(if you exempt the guy who ended up blowing his brains out with a company weapon because he was playing around. These days the spiel actors get include the phrase "the force of blanks can still be deadly, keep clear of the muzzle and don’t ever directly point them at another person at short range. )
It was ultimately his responsibility because it was his production. It was not his fault for pulling the trigger, it was the unsafe working conditions on set.
If any of us died at work due to unsafe working conditions then our families would definitely want the employer held responsible to the full extent of the law. Baldwin may be a famous actor but in this situation he was an employer too, not just an actor.
I will be interested to see the angle the prosecution takes. I think there’s a real sense of embarrassment from the authorities on this one, and they’re trying to make sure they don’t look like they’re sweeping it under the rug to mollify the Hollywood people, but it’s a case with pretty big holes. Since it’s “only” involuntary manslaughter, I wonder if the angle they’ll take is that there’s a legitimate question of fact that even an actor could see that the armorer was a disaffected nepobaby who was bad at her job, and the production wasa chaotic mess, and that all this raised the bar for how Baldwin should have proceeded.
he did. You hold any weapon in your hand, and use it in an irresponsible manner, you’re responsible.
yes, even if an ‘expert’ tells you it’s safe. he had enough wherewithal to know it’s a weapon inherently designed to kill. and to be perfectly blunt, it wasn’t even necessary that he carry a real firearm with dummies. they weren’t filming. they were setting up shots, checking angles and such…
and he should have had enough professional experience to know, you don’t pass guns around like that on a set. it’s controlled by a single person whose responsible for it, and it’s either locked up, being held by that one person, or being actively used by the actor.
The way it works on a movie set is that the weapons master is supposed to check to make sure the weapon is 100% safe if the trigger is pulled and then hands it to the actor. The actor has to be in the head space to do their role properly, which would not include worrying about whether or not the gun is loaded since, in their mind, it’s loaded. That’s exactly why the job of weapons master exists. In this case, it’s the weapons master who fucked up. Baldwin fucked up by creating unsafe workplace practices, not because he pulled the trigger.
Gutierrez-Reed was likely specifically hired because she was inexperienced. Movie sets are chaotic, the work is fast paced and rushed, and safety protocols slow things down. As they say: Time is money. She may not have specifically been hired by Baldwin, but she wasn’t really in a position to push back against it. (she should have, and she’s every bit as negligent.)
However, Baldwin has had a long, long acting career, much of it handling firearms. He- as a professional actor- should have known what the protocols should have been, and should have said something like “hey, you’re not the armorer”, when Dave Halls handed him the pistol.
What a lot of people seem to be misunderstanding is that more than one person can be responsible. Gutierrez-Reed, Halls, Baldwin were all negligent in a variety of ways.
The simplest of ways to have prevented this was to not be using a functional fire arm. There are movie props that are near-perfect replicas (and, on film, would look perfect.) without being capable of firing. This is particularly true considering they weren’t doing live shoots. they were doing blocking, which is a process by where they set up the cameras and check for issues. One of the issues they should have been looking for is, “is this a safe direction to point the gun”.
if you need any more reason to realize you can’t ever assume a firearm, or any other weapon, is “100% safe”, I suggest you give Anna Hutchin’s family a call.
as for his “headspace” do you really think it’s normal for actors to be totally, completely and wholly unaware of what they’re doing? that in fight scenes they’re actually fighting, rather than following a script in perfect choreography? that they’re allowed to not pay attention to safety? No. Every one is always most concerned with safety. Or they should be. yes. that includes the actors.
I think fighting in fight scenes can and often does cause serious injury resulting in hospitalizations, so I’m not sure why you think that’s an especially good argument. It doesn’t have to even be a fight scene. I just read yesterday that Nancy Travis cut her the tip of her finger off with a knife during So I Married an Axe Murderer because she was laughing at what Mike Myers was doing- intentionally making her character laugh in the scene. They could have used a dull knife, but they didn’t.
A better example would be Stallone ending up in the ICU for a week because he wanted the fight at the end of Rocky IV to be realistic, so he told Dolph Lundgren to forget the choreography and Lundgren punched too hard. May I remind you it was Stallone who was directing that movie and still wanted to actually be punched in a boxing ring so he could be in the acting headspace.
There are also character actors like Daniel Day-Lewis who live their characters 24/7 starting long before filming begins and not stopping until it ends. All of his blades in Gangs of New York were razor sharp unless it was known for certain that they would be connecting with someone- but you can’t be certain of that.
That’s just how movies and actors are.
Could they have used a realistic prop gun? That I don’t know about. I would say it would depend on just how realistic we are talking when shot close-up with a high-definition digital camera and blown up to fit an IMAX screen. I’m guessing there gets to be a point where just buying the gun makes more sense than trying to buy a lookalike that looks good enough.
Yes it is, which is why there is a weapon master to (usually) ensure people aren’t put at risk.
Brandon Lee was killed by a gun with dummy bullets. Before that, no one had even thought that sort of thing would happen. Before Rust, no one thought this would happen because no one had been killed by an arms master being this negligent before.
I think things will be different in the future, but expecting an actor to understand the nuances of firearms, let alone be able to do that when they’re trying to prepare for something, should not have been something people should have expected.
And really, your bringing up choreography shows why. Actors are trusting the people who give them the swords that the swords won’t actually cause serious damage. No one is expecting the actors to test that out on watermelons before shooting.
Also, note I have said nothing about criminal liability.
Yeah it was. He says he didn’t pull it, but there was nothing wrong with the gun that would cause it to go off any other way. He was pointing it at people. He pointed a real gun at people and he pulled the trigger. Him being told the gun wasn’t loaded is irrelevant. There are several levels of negligence at play and there’s no excuse for any of it.
how is a person getting shot not the fault of the person shooting the gun? like bro if somebody gives you a gun saying it’s empty and you shoot somebody to death with it. you’re free to go? nah
The person who handed him the gun entire job was to make sure it was safe to use that gun as prop on a movie, to simulate danger, but in an utterly safe manner.
That person not only failed to check the gun, but they were also the source of the live ammo. The armorer has already been sentenced to prison for involuntary manslaughter.
“Every gun is dangerous” is the correct general mantra, but when you hire a person to specifically “make a gun not dangerous” who then directly hands you the gun, it’s pretty reasonable to assume it’s not dangerous. Pulling the trigger as part of your job and then killing someone afterwards isn’t directly your fault at that point.
It’s terrible, but we know from the armorers trial the cause was her extreme negligence, not Alec baldwin expecting his employees and coworkers to do their job.
Counter point: one of my friends is a retired PJ. He was a professional soldier who was involved in armed conflict for years. He knows his way around weapons and absolutely does not fuck around.
We go hunting together, and he owns a lot of very nice guns. Even if he hands me a gun and tells me it’s clear, I still check it. I check it because it’s my responsibility to make sure I know what I’m doing when I’m holding the power of life and death in my hands. I check it if we’re just hanging out at his house, or if we’re zeroing in rifles. I’ve never found one of his guns to be loaded when he didn’t intend it to be, but I have found live rounds in other people’s “safe” guns.
Even if an “expert” on firearms tells you a gun is safe, it’s still a gun that’s in your hands. If it goes off, it’s on you if it kills someone. If you can’t be bothered to take the 30 minutes needed to learn how to check any firearm made in past 200 years, then you have no business touching any gun anywhere. That goes double if your job involves handling firearms in any capacity. If you regularly come into contact with guns, wether you’re a soldier, or cop, or an actor who does action movies, it’s your responsibility to know how guns work and when they’re safe and when they’re not.
Everyone keeps bringing up Brandon Lee when this shooting comes up. But these are grossly different situations. With Brandon, the gun was loaded with blanks, and the blank pushed a bullet that was stuck in the barrel of the gun out. Even if the actor had done a basic check to ensure the gun was only loaded with blanks, it’s entirely reasonable that he did not look down the barrel to make sure it wasn’t blocked. That I would agree falls on the armorer, they were using blanks on set, the Armorer should have made sure the gun was safe to operate with them. With Hutchins on the set of Rust, it would have been obvious that those were real bullets if he had looked at them. Prop bullets for revolvers or other shots where you see whole rounds are supposed to have the back of the bullet drilled out and/or a rattle installed in the shell so they can be identified as inert. A 5 second check would have identified the bullets were real and something was wrong.
He was handed a gun, didn’t check it, and shot a woman.
To put it another way: I use fall arrest harnesses for my job pretty frequently. My employer has a safety guy who maintains our equipment and is ultimately responsible for it. Do some of my coworkers take his word for it when he okays our harnesses, yes. Do I? fuck no. I always inspect my harness and report if something looks frayed or worn down. It’s my ass that works near the edge of a 100 foot drop, not Mr safety. Just because it’s someone’s job to do something doesn’t mean they’ll do it 100% perfect all the time, and when something involves a decent chance of death or terrible injury, it needs to be a 100% on job performance. So don’t rely on one person to be on the ball all the time. If something is deadly, it’s worth looking at twice or even three times to make sure it’s really safe.
While I largely agree, I still don’t fully agree. He should have treated it as loaded because it’s a gun, but I also understand why he didn’t. There are many dangerous facets in our lives where we trust professionals, like doctors and pilots and chefs. Professionals that count on other professionals doing their job and keeping the whole system running.
You can extra prepare, and argue that everyone should at all times, but its also entirely reasonable that we dont run background checks on pilots or breathalyze them before they get onto a plane. We expect the system to work for many dangerous things, and it almost always does. The fact that it almost always does is part of the issue here, because believing the armorer was doing their job to keep people safe is a reasonable assumption.
Should he have applied extra caution to checking that gun? You bet. Do I think he was complacent because of the systems they had on set for gun safety? Yes. Do I think that rises to murder or even extreme negligence? No. It was a lapse in judgement that ended with him killing a person, and that is terrible, but not criminal.
But he wasn’t just a passenger like someone going on vacation. That person would have very little power to do anything about a pilot being possibly high or drunk.
Baldwin was more like the copilot to the drunk captain. He had plenty of power to say something was wrong, and had the responsibility to double check.
If your plane crashed because Captain Morgan the drunk ace missed a safety check, and you and the copilot survived, you would just shrug and say “well we all rely on professionals and this one just slipped through the cracks” you don’t think the copilot has any responsibility for not saying anything or at least double checking the pilot and speaking up if something didn’t look right?
We can trust dangerous things because there’s many people out there that do have jobs that involve double checking other people’s work. A commercial pilot has a copilot who shares the work, monitors instruments, and makes sure the checklists get followed properly. Doctors have nurses that help asses the patient for everything from symptoms to verifying if it’s the right or left leg that’s getting cut off today. Chefs have city health inspectors whose whole job is to come in and make sure the kitchen is clean and they aren’t serving rat shit in with the chili.
So when your job involves guns: famous for being rapidly deadly things, shouldn’t it fall on somebody to at least take a peak and make sure everything looks in order? And just like the pilot and copilot have to make sure the plane is in working order because it’s their responsibility, the actor who is going to be holding the gun should check it and speak up because the gun is their responsibility.
I agree with your points, but I object to this statement:
Even if the actor had done a basic check to ensure the gun was only loaded with blanks, it’s entirely reasonable that he did not look down the barrel to make sure it wasn’t blocked.
You and I have very different definitions of “basic check.” Especially when using blanks, checking that the barrel is clear is (a) not hard, and (b) should be considered part of a basic check. It’s no harder than pointing the barrel at a light source - of which, on a set, there will be any number of bright options - and looking through the open breech to see on there’s light.
That said, what baffles me about the entire industry is that they use real guns at all. Or that they don’t just buy whatever real gun they want and weld-plug the barrel; even an expensive handgun is going to cost them $2k - the welder’s time might double that. An extra $4k is peanuts to any professional production. Shit, there must be a company who’s entire business is providing prop gun rentals to movies. You’re already employing prop people, like Adam Savage; have them replace the front part of the barrel with a solid rod of steel. It has to be cheaper than employing an armoror, and safer than relying on processes.
This part, I’ve never understood. Maybe someone can explain it: why does anyone have to - and why does the industry allow - anyone using Union labor to use real, functioning guns?
i can see why you feel that way, I do too but that’s not how it works. they’re trying to charge the person who shot a person to death. Alec is a part of that plain and simple. he shot the gun.
The person who handed him the gun entire job was to make sure it was safe to use that gun as prop on a movie, to simulate danger, but in an utterly safe manner.
he was handed the gun by an assistant producer. the armorer- Gutierrez-Reed- handed Hall the firearm, who turned around and handed it to baldwin.
Unless the judge has some knowledge that Baldwin either had intent, or was negligent in such a way as to contribute to the death, I’m not seeing what purpose it would serve to have him stand trial. He must feel absolutely terrible as it is, and my understanding is that it was not at all his fault.
Oh yes. He’s reaaalllly sorry. so we should give him special consideration. You know. he’s rich, famous and white. this totally entitles him to special consideration…
nah. Fuck that.
leniency is to be determined during sentencing; not before the trial ever takes place.
Unless the judge has some knowledge that Baldwin either had intent, or was negligent in such a way as to contribute to the death, I’m not seeing what purpose it would serve to have him stand trial. He must feel absolutely terrible as it is, and my understanding is that it was not at all his fault.
Trials are the thing we do that allow juries/judges to come to those conclusions.
Typically, there needs to be enough evidence for an indictment to stand trial. So far, there hasn’t been publicly released enough evidence to show that he was in anyway at fault.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/alec-baldwin-indicted-grand-jury-involuntary-manslaughter/story?id=104954728
Well he already has been indicted by a grand jury. And the standard for them is probable cause, which is a very low bar. Just that he held a gun when it went off and struck someone should meet that for manslaughter.
I know, but I think that indictment should have been thrown out after the firearms coordinator was convicted. This seems heavy-handed and unfair.
Well that’s not the argument you were making. He’s regrettably met the minimum standards for it to go to a proper court, though.
I don’t think it’s heavy-handed to think an incident can have multiple parties responsible. It’s very possibly that. I think a jury should determine if Baldwin legally should’ve done better, using evidence and witness testimony about what would normally happen.
Personally I think it’s much more the armorer’s fault. I agree with you. But I wasn’t there, I don’t know that we have all the information, or even that the information I’ve learned is completely accurate. A trial is the way to get all the information and certify it as true under penalty of perjury. Then the people who have been given every fact from both sides can make that determination.
it kinda is, although it would be fair to say i was being circumspect.
i agree that multiple parties can be responsible for a thing, but i really feel these questions should have been adequately answered (and have) during the investigations. unless there’s a pile of evidence that hasn’t been made public (which is possible, i admit), then this all seems like so much theater.
you raise good points though, and i realize that we’re debating opinions here, not strictly the facts, so i’m not really trying to convince you of anything-- just to express my position.
He was the employer and he fostered the conditions that led to a death. Something we truly need to penalize.
Not whataboutism, but why they he’ll don’t we pursue corporations this vigorously when their bad conditions get people killed?
THOUGHT CRIME DETECTED STAY WHERE YOU ARE CITIZEN FOR MANDATORY CORPORATE THOUGHT RETRAINING
Not with a manslaughter charge.
Yes with a manslaughter charge.
Employers cut corners all the time to increase production or profit. They should be held accountable if their decision directly leads to someone’s death.
He had a hand in choosing the armorer. His employees were using the firearms on set for recreational shooting with live ammo. We don’t know if he knew that, but if he did then he’s responsible for not firing the armorer for a gross breach of safety. He was at least partially responsible for that and should face consequences for it.
And anyone who touches a gun should not just believe what someone says about it. That’s literally rule 1 of guns: they’re all loaded until proven otherwise by the person holding it. There’s many people whose friend handed them a gun to look at and promised it’s unloaded, only to ventilate said friend or an innocent bystander. Whoever has a gun is responsible for that gun, it’s a big responsibility but not a hard one. Guns are not mystical objects, it takes like half an hour to learn how basically every firearm made in the past 150 years works, and how to check if all of them are safe. You’re not flying a plane when you have a revolver in your hand. He was handed a gun, told it was safe, did nothing to verify that, and shot a woman because of it. If it happened to me and I killed my friend or wife, I’d already be in jail. But because it happened on a movie set, it’s suddenly a big question about who was responsible.
I have friends who own a lot of guns. I’ve held a lot of other people’s guns. As soon as it’s in your hands, it’s your responsibility. Doesn’t matter if we just got back from the FFL and it’s fresh out of the box. Doesn’t matter if there’s no bullets of that caliber anywhere on the property. Doesn’t fucking matter if someone you consider to be an expert hands you a weapon and tells you it’s clear. When a gun touches your hand, you are responsible for it and everything it can do. You take the 3 seconds it takes to clear it yourself and ask any questions that come up. If he had just looked at the gun and asked “why are their bullets in here” and “why don’t the bullets look like they’re props” then Halyna Hutchins would still be alive.
Damn straight, well said
That’s basically what manslaughter is for. Times when someone dies unintentionally, but there’s proof that someone’s actions created that circumstance.
For context another manslaughter charge that stuck in film is the case of Sarah Jones who was run down by a train trying to rescue equipment off a tressle track that the company wasn’t properly cleared to work on. Three people took the hit in that case. Two out of three Executive Producers and the First Assistant Director (a position that serves as the on set safety veto) were charged and received prison sentences in that case.
It is also known that the Rust production had fielded massive concerns from crew regarding gun safety on set in the days before the accident when Baldwin’s stunt double fired two live rounds from a firearm that was not properly checked or cleared and called “cold” on handoff. He just didn’t hit anybody.
This production literally had a full dry run of the fatal incident with Baldwin’s stunt double. Everything from the handoff to the call of “cold gun” was duplicated on the day of the fatal event. That the Stunt double incident didn’t cause a full stop and inquiry with a massive change of protocols to the industry’s best practice Brandon Lee standard is utterly baffling. The whole situation really is a rare and particularly damning senario of extreme negligence on behalf of production and when the negligence pie gets that big it will surprise you who gets a slice.
The purpose is to prosecute him for the crime he has been charged with. That charge is Involuntary manslaughter, which explicitly means he was negligent in a way that lead to the death of another person. The purpose of having him(or literally anyone) stand trial in the American justice system is (supposed) to examine the evidence and determine if it supports the charges against the (presumed innocent) defendant. You don’t get let off the hook for your mistakes just because you ‘feel absolutely terrible’ about it. Your understanding of fault in this situation is incorrect.
true, most of the blame goes to dumbass negligent idiot who didnt care to do her armourer job and check for live ammo at any point (and probably brought that shit to the set)
and now its about if baldwins trigger pull and bad management is sentence worthy
It won’t be intent. The article says that it’s involuntary manslaughter at issue. Probably negligence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter#Involuntary
He was negligent but not in his position as the actor holding the weapon. My understanding is he is partly responsible for deciding to choose a non-union safety team that lead to the death.
Actually… Both. In regular Firearm handoff protocols Actors have a responsibility to uphold on their end. If everything is done to spec it is impossible to fire a live round from a firearm. Some small obstruction in the barrel getting missed and propelled might be in the realm of reasonable but part of the process of handoff requires a mini briefing on handoff of the weapon where each round is checked over where the actor can see and only authorized people are allowed to handle weapons at all. Been standard since the Brandon Lee death on “The Crow”.
Baldwin took the gun from a person on set whom everyone would have known wasn’t supposed to be handling it and didn’t insist on a check. In our industry actors are briefed every time they accept a role that it is their partial responsibility to make sure those checks are done because it is not just a safety thing, it’s a liability issue if you harm someone. If a check is missed as an actor you are supposed to flag it and refuse the unsafe handoff to clear you of any potential liability or after the fact regrets…
Thing is this protocol has ever been throughly tested in a court setting. The last time anyone was killed by a bullet on a set was the cause of the massive change to the industry standard protocol in a mass concerted effort to do a “never again” style pledge which basically worked for 30 years straight. The other notable gun death was an actor who killed himself with a blank by pointing the gun at his own noggin and pulling the trigger which which was something he was expressly not supposed to do for a scene, he just did it on his own without anybody’s sign off.
This industry sea change in part is designed to exonerate Productions from negligence charges like what happened on The Crow but it also made it one of the most well respected industry protocols as the Lee death basically became one of the industry’s cautionary tale that lingers being retold to each new generation of crew. While non-union sets tend to be less regimented it is known fact that concerns of gun safety issues were already flagged and bought to production by the concerned Rust crew and no motion was made to change. Potentially Baldwin as part of a group may have directly ignored further appeals to firearm related safety prior to the shooting. This isn’t the Brandon Lee situation over again - the industry now is a whole new ball game.
(Edit : Forgot to mention that the Rust crew had almost a full beat for beat dry run of the incident a few days before the incident where Baldwin’s stunt double discharged two live rounds after being handed a gun that he was told was “cold”… How one ignores that kind of wake up call I’ll never know.)
I read some more comments and I agree, I was too easy to convince that the actor doesn’t bear responsibility.
I also liked another comment just discussing that it was a real gun, regardless of on set or off. Like anyone else handling a firearm in any other situation, the actor holding it is responsible for checking if it is loaded before pulling the trigger and for ensuring nobody is in the path of any bullet.
It be like that. As a person with my first decade of union/non union film now under my belt and trying for the shop steward program I find it really difficult to convey to people just how stunningly bad the praxis on the Rust set appears from an insider perspective. It’s really difficult because people don’t understand how regimented the safety protocols in film are and how ubiquitous certain ones really are. It’s also hard for people to really grock power dynamics on a set. Like there have been people who have been banished instantly from set for being in an actor of Baldwin’s power positions eyeline. Any regular crew would have risked their jobs to try and appeal directly to Baldwin to be safer and this was the year after film was halted for upwards of 8 months due to covid and was slow to come back. There were a lot of desperate people in film trying to make back the debts they incurred by the unexpected famine.
People have been sentanced to prison on manslaughter charges in film for a lot less than what happened on Rust.
Why do they even use real weapons for those kinds of shots? I fell like a high quality fake would be indistinguishable on screen but not even give the opportunity for something like this to happen except for the actor being given the absolute wrong prop.
More or less because the blanks give a more realistic recoil and the smoke whisps which saves on time and processing in post and you can see if the action works in real time on review… and there are arguements that handling the real deal does actually add to the performance…
But like the standard done properly makes it incredibly difficult for injuries from weapons to occur. Consider that in 30 years the gun deaths in film plunged to almost zero *. There is way more production out there then there used to be and every scene where you see a gun being fired that is usually not one take and those takes were repeated over and over again. That’s tens of thousands of safe handles over the years.
I don’t have any issues with sets having or deciding to not have real guns but the real thing is that on a set that is doing the standard every weapon from barely looking like a gun at all rubber replica to projectiless gas powered airsoft gun are all treated as though they were real. When they are handed over you have to be shown exactly what they are and replica or not they can never be left unsupervised. They are always in authorized hands or locked up.
It’s part of why this case is so important. Anyone with money can make a non-union film. The best practices transcend union borders because accidents made from cupidity and negligence should have consequences. You ignore the warnings then the consequences are yours. The discourse often frames this as a personal issue but it’s a systemic one. Showing producers that being safe is a sometimes food is a dangerous precedent because the power they have over people is no joke.
It was ultimately his responsibility because it was his production. It was not his fault for pulling the trigger, it was the unsafe working conditions on set.
If any of us died at work due to unsafe working conditions then our families would definitely want the employer held responsible to the full extent of the law. Baldwin may be a famous actor but in this situation he was an employer too, not just an actor.
That seems to contradict the article:
The prosecutor is explicitly arguing that he has responsibility because he was holding the gun.
I will be interested to see the angle the prosecution takes. I think there’s a real sense of embarrassment from the authorities on this one, and they’re trying to make sure they don’t look like they’re sweeping it under the rug to mollify the Hollywood people, but it’s a case with pretty big holes. Since it’s “only” involuntary manslaughter, I wonder if the angle they’ll take is that there’s a legitimate question of fact that even an actor could see that the armorer was a disaffected nepobaby who was bad at her job, and the production wasa chaotic mess, and that all this raised the bar for how Baldwin should have proceeded.
he did. You hold any weapon in your hand, and use it in an irresponsible manner, you’re responsible.
yes, even if an ‘expert’ tells you it’s safe. he had enough wherewithal to know it’s a weapon inherently designed to kill. and to be perfectly blunt, it wasn’t even necessary that he carry a real firearm with dummies. they weren’t filming. they were setting up shots, checking angles and such…
and he should have had enough professional experience to know, you don’t pass guns around like that on a set. it’s controlled by a single person whose responsible for it, and it’s either locked up, being held by that one person, or being actively used by the actor.
The way it works on a movie set is that the weapons master is supposed to check to make sure the weapon is 100% safe if the trigger is pulled and then hands it to the actor. The actor has to be in the head space to do their role properly, which would not include worrying about whether or not the gun is loaded since, in their mind, it’s loaded. That’s exactly why the job of weapons master exists. In this case, it’s the weapons master who fucked up. Baldwin fucked up by creating unsafe workplace practices, not because he pulled the trigger.
Gutierrez-Reed was likely specifically hired because she was inexperienced. Movie sets are chaotic, the work is fast paced and rushed, and safety protocols slow things down. As they say: Time is money. She may not have specifically been hired by Baldwin, but she wasn’t really in a position to push back against it. (she should have, and she’s every bit as negligent.)
However, Baldwin has had a long, long acting career, much of it handling firearms. He- as a professional actor- should have known what the protocols should have been, and should have said something like “hey, you’re not the armorer”, when Dave Halls handed him the pistol.
What a lot of people seem to be misunderstanding is that more than one person can be responsible. Gutierrez-Reed, Halls, Baldwin were all negligent in a variety of ways.
The simplest of ways to have prevented this was to not be using a functional fire arm. There are movie props that are near-perfect replicas (and, on film, would look perfect.) without being capable of firing. This is particularly true considering they weren’t doing live shoots. they were doing blocking, which is a process by where they set up the cameras and check for issues. One of the issues they should have been looking for is, “is this a safe direction to point the gun”.
if you need any more reason to realize you can’t ever assume a firearm, or any other weapon, is “100% safe”, I suggest you give Anna Hutchin’s family a call.
as for his “headspace” do you really think it’s normal for actors to be totally, completely and wholly unaware of what they’re doing? that in fight scenes they’re actually fighting, rather than following a script in perfect choreography? that they’re allowed to not pay attention to safety? No. Every one is always most concerned with safety. Or they should be. yes. that includes the actors.
I think fighting in fight scenes can and often does cause serious injury resulting in hospitalizations, so I’m not sure why you think that’s an especially good argument. It doesn’t have to even be a fight scene. I just read yesterday that Nancy Travis cut her the tip of her finger off with a knife during So I Married an Axe Murderer because she was laughing at what Mike Myers was doing- intentionally making her character laugh in the scene. They could have used a dull knife, but they didn’t.
A better example would be Stallone ending up in the ICU for a week because he wanted the fight at the end of Rocky IV to be realistic, so he told Dolph Lundgren to forget the choreography and Lundgren punched too hard. May I remind you it was Stallone who was directing that movie and still wanted to actually be punched in a boxing ring so he could be in the acting headspace.
There are also character actors like Daniel Day-Lewis who live their characters 24/7 starting long before filming begins and not stopping until it ends. All of his blades in Gangs of New York were razor sharp unless it was known for certain that they would be connecting with someone- but you can’t be certain of that.
That’s just how movies and actors are.
Could they have used a realistic prop gun? That I don’t know about. I would say it would depend on just how realistic we are talking when shot close-up with a high-definition digital camera and blown up to fit an IMAX screen. I’m guessing there gets to be a point where just buying the gun makes more sense than trying to buy a lookalike that looks good enough.
Method acting has its draw backs and one of them is safety.
“That’s just how actors are” is a shitty, pathetic excuse for putting other people at risk.
Particularly when that risk is from a weapon fundamentally designed to kill people, and it certainly doesn’t absolve anyone of criminal liability.
Yes it is, which is why there is a weapon master to (usually) ensure people aren’t put at risk.
Brandon Lee was killed by a gun with dummy bullets. Before that, no one had even thought that sort of thing would happen. Before Rust, no one thought this would happen because no one had been killed by an arms master being this negligent before.
I think things will be different in the future, but expecting an actor to understand the nuances of firearms, let alone be able to do that when they’re trying to prepare for something, should not have been something people should have expected.
And really, your bringing up choreography shows why. Actors are trusting the people who give them the swords that the swords won’t actually cause serious damage. No one is expecting the actors to test that out on watermelons before shooting.
Also, note I have said nothing about criminal liability.
Worker go in without a mask and gets cancer: should have known 🤷♂️
Completely different scenarios. In yours the person hurts themselves. In this case Baldwin hurt someone else, allegedly due to his own negligence.
Closer to: Worker drives forklift around blindfolded. Hits someone killing them. It’s both the managers fault and blindfold guy.
Fault is percentage based on the US. The employer and employer can be civilly liable for damages. But this is a criminal trial.
If this was a trucker who refused to check his blind spot routineoy before merging and killed someone the trucker would be held to account.
Yeah it was. He says he didn’t pull it, but there was nothing wrong with the gun that would cause it to go off any other way. He was pointing it at people. He pointed a real gun at people and he pulled the trigger. Him being told the gun wasn’t loaded is irrelevant. There are several levels of negligence at play and there’s no excuse for any of it.
how is a person getting shot not the fault of the person shooting the gun? like bro if somebody gives you a gun saying it’s empty and you shoot somebody to death with it. you’re free to go? nah
The person who handed him the gun entire job was to make sure it was safe to use that gun as prop on a movie, to simulate danger, but in an utterly safe manner.
That person not only failed to check the gun, but they were also the source of the live ammo. The armorer has already been sentenced to prison for involuntary manslaughter.
“Every gun is dangerous” is the correct general mantra, but when you hire a person to specifically “make a gun not dangerous” who then directly hands you the gun, it’s pretty reasonable to assume it’s not dangerous. Pulling the trigger as part of your job and then killing someone afterwards isn’t directly your fault at that point.
It’s terrible, but we know from the armorers trial the cause was her extreme negligence, not Alec baldwin expecting his employees and coworkers to do their job.
Counter point: one of my friends is a retired PJ. He was a professional soldier who was involved in armed conflict for years. He knows his way around weapons and absolutely does not fuck around.
We go hunting together, and he owns a lot of very nice guns. Even if he hands me a gun and tells me it’s clear, I still check it. I check it because it’s my responsibility to make sure I know what I’m doing when I’m holding the power of life and death in my hands. I check it if we’re just hanging out at his house, or if we’re zeroing in rifles. I’ve never found one of his guns to be loaded when he didn’t intend it to be, but I have found live rounds in other people’s “safe” guns.
Even if an “expert” on firearms tells you a gun is safe, it’s still a gun that’s in your hands. If it goes off, it’s on you if it kills someone. If you can’t be bothered to take the 30 minutes needed to learn how to check any firearm made in past 200 years, then you have no business touching any gun anywhere. That goes double if your job involves handling firearms in any capacity. If you regularly come into contact with guns, wether you’re a soldier, or cop, or an actor who does action movies, it’s your responsibility to know how guns work and when they’re safe and when they’re not.
Everyone keeps bringing up Brandon Lee when this shooting comes up. But these are grossly different situations. With Brandon, the gun was loaded with blanks, and the blank pushed a bullet that was stuck in the barrel of the gun out. Even if the actor had done a basic check to ensure the gun was only loaded with blanks, it’s entirely reasonable that he did not look down the barrel to make sure it wasn’t blocked. That I would agree falls on the armorer, they were using blanks on set, the Armorer should have made sure the gun was safe to operate with them. With Hutchins on the set of Rust, it would have been obvious that those were real bullets if he had looked at them. Prop bullets for revolvers or other shots where you see whole rounds are supposed to have the back of the bullet drilled out and/or a rattle installed in the shell so they can be identified as inert. A 5 second check would have identified the bullets were real and something was wrong.
He was handed a gun, didn’t check it, and shot a woman.
To put it another way: I use fall arrest harnesses for my job pretty frequently. My employer has a safety guy who maintains our equipment and is ultimately responsible for it. Do some of my coworkers take his word for it when he okays our harnesses, yes. Do I? fuck no. I always inspect my harness and report if something looks frayed or worn down. It’s my ass that works near the edge of a 100 foot drop, not Mr safety. Just because it’s someone’s job to do something doesn’t mean they’ll do it 100% perfect all the time, and when something involves a decent chance of death or terrible injury, it needs to be a 100% on job performance. So don’t rely on one person to be on the ball all the time. If something is deadly, it’s worth looking at twice or even three times to make sure it’s really safe.
While I largely agree, I still don’t fully agree. He should have treated it as loaded because it’s a gun, but I also understand why he didn’t. There are many dangerous facets in our lives where we trust professionals, like doctors and pilots and chefs. Professionals that count on other professionals doing their job and keeping the whole system running.
You can extra prepare, and argue that everyone should at all times, but its also entirely reasonable that we dont run background checks on pilots or breathalyze them before they get onto a plane. We expect the system to work for many dangerous things, and it almost always does. The fact that it almost always does is part of the issue here, because believing the armorer was doing their job to keep people safe is a reasonable assumption.
Should he have applied extra caution to checking that gun? You bet. Do I think he was complacent because of the systems they had on set for gun safety? Yes. Do I think that rises to murder or even extreme negligence? No. It was a lapse in judgement that ended with him killing a person, and that is terrible, but not criminal.
But he wasn’t just a passenger like someone going on vacation. That person would have very little power to do anything about a pilot being possibly high or drunk.
Baldwin was more like the copilot to the drunk captain. He had plenty of power to say something was wrong, and had the responsibility to double check.
If your plane crashed because Captain Morgan the drunk ace missed a safety check, and you and the copilot survived, you would just shrug and say “well we all rely on professionals and this one just slipped through the cracks” you don’t think the copilot has any responsibility for not saying anything or at least double checking the pilot and speaking up if something didn’t look right?
We can trust dangerous things because there’s many people out there that do have jobs that involve double checking other people’s work. A commercial pilot has a copilot who shares the work, monitors instruments, and makes sure the checklists get followed properly. Doctors have nurses that help asses the patient for everything from symptoms to verifying if it’s the right or left leg that’s getting cut off today. Chefs have city health inspectors whose whole job is to come in and make sure the kitchen is clean and they aren’t serving rat shit in with the chili.
So when your job involves guns: famous for being rapidly deadly things, shouldn’t it fall on somebody to at least take a peak and make sure everything looks in order? And just like the pilot and copilot have to make sure the plane is in working order because it’s their responsibility, the actor who is going to be holding the gun should check it and speak up because the gun is their responsibility.
I agree with your points, but I object to this statement:
You and I have very different definitions of “basic check.” Especially when using blanks, checking that the barrel is clear is (a) not hard, and (b) should be considered part of a basic check. It’s no harder than pointing the barrel at a light source - of which, on a set, there will be any number of bright options - and looking through the open breech to see on there’s light.
That said, what baffles me about the entire industry is that they use real guns at all. Or that they don’t just buy whatever real gun they want and weld-plug the barrel; even an expensive handgun is going to cost them $2k - the welder’s time might double that. An extra $4k is peanuts to any professional production. Shit, there must be a company who’s entire business is providing prop gun rentals to movies. You’re already employing prop people, like Adam Savage; have them replace the front part of the barrel with a solid rod of steel. It has to be cheaper than employing an armoror, and safer than relying on processes.
This part, I’ve never understood. Maybe someone can explain it: why does anyone have to - and why does the industry allow - anyone using Union labor to use real, functioning guns?
i can see why you feel that way, I do too but that’s not how it works. they’re trying to charge the person who shot a person to death. Alec is a part of that plain and simple. he shot the gun.
he was handed the gun by an assistant producer. the armorer- Gutierrez-Reed- handed Hall the firearm, who turned around and handed it to baldwin.
So no. that’s not true at all.
Oh yes. He’s reaaalllly sorry. so we should give him special consideration. You know. he’s rich, famous and white. this totally entitles him to special consideration…
nah. Fuck that.
leniency is to be determined during sentencing; not before the trial ever takes place.
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