Part of me wants to partly blame him, but then, would you blame a race car driver if a part fails, causing him to careen into a crowd, killing someone. Sometimes there needs to be a responsible party for verifying safety. That person should go to prison in this case. But I don’t think it’s Baldwin.
And this was an independent film. They may have been sloppy. “Hey, joe has a glock in his glove box. Get it out and throw a few blanks in it.”
Everybody forgets the one in the chamber. e.g. Terry Kath.
Baldwin was in part responsible for hiring that person as one of the producers. And as I pointed out earlier, he’s handled firearms in movies enough to have learned basic safety techniques.
He bears a significant part of the responsibility for this event, as it appears right now.
There was nothing defective about the weapon as it fired a projectile. It functioned as designed and the user is the last link in safety protocols. The person launching a projectile, knowingly or unknowingly, bears the final responsibility for where it strikes. That said, none of that will apply to Baldwin because of his politics.
Close analogy but there are things a driver can check such as low pressure in the brake pedal, grinding when pressing the brakes, play in the steering wheel, etc. The same is true of someone wielding a firearm on a movie set:
-Is this a real gun or a prop? How do I know?
-Did I load it? What did I load it with?
-If I didn't load it, did I witness what was loaded into it?
-Is my first trigger pull going going to be into the sand trap, just in case?
-What am I aiming at?
-Are those downrange from it protected?
-Is this the same gun the members of the crew were using for target shooting yesterday?
Alec Baldwin was one of the producers who needed to ask the question, "how important is it for this scene to risk a "facing-the-camera shot"? If we can't fake it (in Hollywood no less), do we have a bulletproof partition protecting the crew? Do we have two mirrors with sandbags behind them?
Long ago airshows were banned from "energy toward the crowd" with the intent of minimizing crashes that would injure or kill spectators.