A good article, but it didn’t emphasize a few things it should have.
First, what happened was a negligent discharge. There was no accident.
Second, a very important firearm safety rule is to assume all firearms are loaded and how you should transfer a firearm from your possession to that of another person. Anytime you hand a firearm to someone, you should open the action to insure that the firearm is unloaded. You should then make sure that the person receiving the firearm also inspects it.
Lastly, the person receiving a firearm should examine it to insure it is loaded with the correct ammunition.
Ideally, the single action revolver would have been handed to Baldwin in an unloaded condition. Then blank ammo would have been handed to him. Alternately he should have at least witnessed it being loaded with “blanks.”
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.