What The Baldwin Mishap Says About Guns Isn’t What You Might Think

The right to keep and bear arms is, at a last resort, our most important right, thus it’s one that should be exercised with the utmost care and attention to detail.

The investigation into the fatal shooting of movie camerawoman Halyna Hutchins by actor Alec Baldwin with a prop gun on the set of the latter’s movie, “Rust,” last Thursday is ongoing, with new information and speculations appearing daily, so prudent people will let the investigation run its course before reaching conclusions. The fact that Mr. Baldwin has been a hard-core leftist activist, particularly against the right to keep and bear arms, should not lessen conservatives’ self-restraint in this regard.

We have been told several key elements so far. During a rehearsal, Baldwin pointed in Mrs. Hutchins’s direction a single-action revolver that a film crew member had claimed was unloaded. The gun fired, perhaps because Baldwin cocked the hammer prematurely or pulled the trigger unintentionally, something got caught on the trigger, the gun malfunctioned, or Baldwin fired the gun intentionally for rehearsal purposes, thinking it was unloaded—and Hutchins and film director Joel Souza were struck, the latter non-fatally. Also, the same gun may have been used by some film crew members for target shooting with conventional ammunition earlier in the day.

However, as with people’s reactions to many other topics in modern society’s news cycle, in this instance self-restraint against conclusion-jumping is not universal. Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who normally gadflies on topics more within his area of expertise, knee-jerked, “What is needed now is a clear law that categorically prohibits any real gun or real bullet from being used on a film set.”

Of course, no such need has been established. Movies have a good, if not perfect, track record where firearm safety is concerned and, although we should still wait for the results of the investigation, what has been reported thus far suggests, if anything, not that the movie industry’s safety procedures are inadequate, but that they may not have been followed by Baldwin and some members of his crew.

One fact about the tragedy appears to have emerged: an effort to exonerate Baldwin, one of the hard left’s favored Hollywood personalities. Most conspicuously, Democrats and leftwing civilian disarmament activist groups, who would otherwise be using the tragedy as the launchpad for an indignant and self-righteous campaign against the right to keep and bear arms, are being silent.

More subtly, a Fox News article quoted a movie prop master explaining how people in his line of work are responsible for checking firearms before they get into actors’ hands. “If you do enough safety checks along the way, nothing should happen. But, obviously, the gun on Alec Baldwin’s set was not checked. Because if it was, they would have seen the bullet in there,” he reportedly said.

Another Fox News article stated that “a camera operator who was working on the film’s set [the day of the tragedy] noted to detectives that Baldwin was very careful when it came to the use of prop firearms while filming prior to the tragic accident,” and “the actor observed all the safety protocols and even did an extra check-in with the crew to make sure no one was near him. Specifically, he made sure a child who was on set that day wasn’t anywhere near him when discharging the weapon.”

However, whatever the movie industry’s protocols may be, in the firearm training world it’s universally understood that once a person takes a gun into his or her hands, he or she is responsible for it. And while the cameraman Fox quoted may be correct that Baldwin was safe previously, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that he was without fault in Hutchins’s death.

Furthermore, in the firearm training world, the Baldwin incident would not be considered an “accident”—a mishap that occurs despite someone doing everything correctly. Unless someone deliberately loaded the gun with conventional ammunition, knowing it would be fired by Baldwin in that condition—which at this point there is no publicly known reason to suspect—the tragedy was the result of “negligence”—something that occurred because one or more people failed to follow safety rules and procedures.

There’s A Reason to Always Follow the Rules

Leading voices among firearm instructors, their organizations, and the firearm industry commonly advise many safety rules. Some apply to all firearms, some to certain types of firearms because of how they function mechanically, and others to certain situations, such as training classes, shooting competitions, and the making of movies. Furthermore, several rules are widely considered cardinal and may be relevant in this instance.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), which has thousands of certified instructors nationwide, has long advised three safety rules that apply to all firearms at all times. The military, which trains almost as many Americans annually as NRA instructors do, uses basic firearm safety rules that track with the first two of the NRA’s rules.

The NRA’s first rule is “Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction.” Normally that means, among other things, “not at another person.” Its meaning and purpose is so obvious that even someone with no experience handling firearms can understand it.

It’s often described as the most important rule, on the reasoning that even if someone failed to follow every other rule, and as a result fired a gun unintentionally, if that person were pointing the gun in a safe direction at the time the gun fired, he or she might be embarrassed and would almost certainly be read the Riot Act by the range safety officer at a shooting range, but no one would have been hurt.

The NRA’s second and third rules are “Always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot” and “Always keep the gun unloaded until ready to use,” the intents of which are also easy for almost anyone to understand.

Whether the intents of these rules were violated in Baldwin’s instance would depend on whether the scene he was rehearsing called for him to fire the gun (loaded with blank ammunition, of course) in the direction of Hutchins’s camera with her manning the camera, whether crew members in the chain of custody of Baldwin’s gun inspected the gun according to movie industry safety protocols, and whether there was any lapse, even for a moment, in that chain of custody.

Regular Training Reduces Risk

People who train seriously with firearms load, unload, and otherwise handle firearms so frequently that they must adhere to safety rules religiously, lest Murphy’s Law force a mishap. In training and competition events, participants are frequently required to unload firearms while observed by supervisory personnel, and go through various steps to demonstrate beyond any doubt that their guns are unloaded.

Serious gun owners don’t follow safety rules only most of the time, or when they feel like it, or when someone else is looking, or when they’re not in a hurry, or when they’re not distracted. They do things correctly each and every time. This is because doing things the safe way is more safe, and because by doing things correctly every time, they program themselves to do those things even if tired or distracted.

No one is born knowing how to handle firearms safely. Liking guns is not the same as knowing how to handle them. Even having owned guns for many years, and having shot guns many times, is not proof of knowing how to handle firearms correctly. The right to keep and bear arms is, at a last resort, our most important right, thus it’s one that should be exercised with the utmost care and attention to detail.

The gun was to be loaded with dummy rounds, not blanks, and reportedly had at least three dummy rounds in it.

Actors are not going to have the expertise to load and unload every kind of gun out there, and tell the difference between live rounds, dummy rounds and blanks. The actor supposedly has the right to ask the armorer to show him that the gun is properly set up.

In the case of an empty gun, or dummy rounds, part of the armorer’s or AD’s check could be to fire it into the ground to confirm it will not fire anything. Can the actor test fire it too? They’d basically have to watch the armorer do it, or have the armorer watch them, to confirm conditions are right so that no damage is caused if the gun does prove to fire unexpectedly.

If an actor happens to be an expert on all of this stuff, they could certainly unofficially check the gun themselves. But that would not be something that they are trained to do or told to do as standard practice.

Now, the question of should Baldwin have ever pointed the gun at another human being is a valid one. No one yet knows if he pulled the trigger on purpose or accidentally, or if the gun somehow fired on its own. We don’t know if he was instructed to hold a pose for the camera, while other people were walking around and passing in front of the gun. If someone told him to point the gun in another person’s direction and pull the trigger, he still arguably shouldn’t have done it, and should have demanded that person move out of the path of the gun. Certainly IF he was required to point the gun at someone for the shot, that would’ve been a great time to ask that the gun be double-checked in his presence.

Well we need to specify what books are safe and ban all the others.

You're just 37 years late for this idea...

Eerily familiar...

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

16. Ministry Of Truth
.......
The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.
The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.
The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.
Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.
When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.
In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.
What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.
In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.
There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.
And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

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