You may have missed the point of the commentary.
I thought the main idea was the focus on the chain of events that lead up to the precipitating incident. Selleck was correct in a too-little-too-late sort of way. Just like Alec Baldwin. As producer this tragedy was 100 percent his responsibility.
Read the last line of the editorial:
*********************************************************
Sorry Mr. Selleck, chalk up a demerit for yourself in this little tale.
You owe the bit player an apology. He has an excuse. He is an ordinary idiot. But your production staff and crew- what is THEIR excuse???
*******************************************************
And by the by, you HAVE read the comments your real life namesake Mark Twain made about guns?
A quick taste:
Don’t meddle with old unloaded firearms. They are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. You don’t have to take any pains at all with them; you don’t have to have a rest, you don’t have to have any sights on the gun, you don’t have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can’t hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three-quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his mother every time at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been boys armed with old rusty muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it makes me shudder.
- Advice to Youth speech, 4/15/1882
I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith & Wesson’s seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult. But I thought it was grand. It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon. It had only one fault—you could not hit anything with it. One of our ‘conductors’ practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and behaved herself she was safe; but as soon as she went to moving about, and he got to shooting at other things, she came to grief.
- Roughing It
George Bemis . . . wore in his belt an old original “Allen” revolver, such as irreverent people called a “pepper-box.” Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol. As the trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball. To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done with an “Allen” in the world. But George’s was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers afterward said, “If she didn’t get what she went after, she would fetch something else.” And so she did. She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon—the “Allen.” Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it.
- Roughing It
The question is, did Tom Selleck do the right thing to stop an unsafe event as it was happening? The answer is yes.
Do we know what happened afterward, were there repercussions to the staff, which allowed the events to occur? I do not see evidence of it, one way or the other.
However, as this was a rare event, it appears the staff acted correctly most of the time.
Yes, I have read Samuel Clements remarks on pistols.
It was an early version of today's anti-Second Amendment screed, done with humor, and therefore more effective. I cringed when I first read those words, about 40 years ago. I still do today.
Clemens was not skilled with weapons, and he was not willing to become so; so he derided their effectiveness.
Clemens was a proto-Progressive.
He had considerable talent. I can see, now, how it was used to tear down the society which produced him.