Don't exclude any possibilty - there was also a great deal of anger over conditions on the set by some.

They prolly said somethin about his momma.. 😟

I’m thinking the same thing. I’ve never known a firearm to spontaneously fire without some sort of mechanical intervention. If more than one shot was fired then that should pretty much rule out accidental.

It’s called a negligent discharge. You are one hundred percent correct. Guns very very rarely fire unless your booger hook is involved.

a perfect post.
Thank you.

Frank..!! 🤣

Apparently the gun had a live round(s) in it but Baldwin nor the assistant director knew it.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alec-baldwin-was-told-prop-gun-was-safe-fatal-shooting-n1282200 

I’m wondering why no one is checking these “prop” guns before a possession change. One of the basic firearm rules states that every firearm is to be assumed loaded until proven otherwise.

What kind of idiot is the armourer? I can’t think of a situation where a qualified armourer would hand a firearm to another person without locking the slide back on a semi-automatic pistol to show it empty. Or if it was a revolver then it would be proper to disengage the cylinder so one could observe all chambers to insure they are empty. If a round had been loaded by doing so one would be able to determine if it was a live round. If unable to do so, then those rounds should have been removed and reloaded with known rounds that did not have projectiles.

I don’t know what the criminal statues are where this incident occurred, but if it happened in Louisiana he should have been arrested and charged with negligent homicide. It is his responsibility to make sure he does not fire a live round that injures someone. One can blame the armorer as much as they want, but apparently he isn’t the one who pulled the trigger.

That said, I’ll be very pleasantly surprised if he is criminally charged.

Yup, I'm guessing the local law was star struck and or the movie business is bringing in a bunch of money to influential locals.

If using actual firearms everyone should have had basic firearm safety training that would have prevented a death and a gunshot wound.

I'm guessing someone, gee, some people, like the shooter maybe, was too arrogant for any such trivial training. I'm also guessing the truth will only leak out as the movie crew is afraid talking will get them blackballed.

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I really don't see charges being brought against him unless it turns out he told the prop peoples to F off and grabbed an unapproved weapon or brought in live ammo and loaded it himself. Police are apparently treating this as a shooting investigation so far, but it's likely this will fall under OSHA's purview.

Everything you've said about verifying a gun is empty is absolutely correct in a real world setting. In the context of making a movie, not so much. Have you seen John Wick? If they stopped filming every time a weapon changed hands, so an actor could verify empty then reload themselves with all the expertise gained from a few day/week safety course, they'd finish production sometime around 2065.

According to another article, the live rounds claim came from a prop workers union. Police did not verify and the union clarified that they consider blanks live rounds. Apparently a lot of films add gunfire digitally. Probably something that should be made the standard and avoid these kinds of incidents.

I'm not trying to stand in defense of Baldwin. I really don't give a rat's azz about him one way or the other. But there are too few verified details out there to accurately place blame.

Baldwin WILL SKATE BIG-TIME...

UNLESS HE WAS SCREWING AROUND AND DELIBERATELY POINTING THAT PROP GUN INTO HER FACE AND PULLED THE TRIGGER AS A "JOKE"....

WHICH I have seen many many people who never had a gun safety course do, or were never brought up with firearms training and respect, or he was drunk or high and being a jokester pointing guns at people on the set...

I'm guessing that it was him joking around and being very dangerous in his actions...

If so...they will fry his ass with accidental manslaughter at least...

Before Alec Baldwin pulled the trigger, two film-set workers handled gun on set

WAPO
Before Alec Baldwin pulled the trigger on a prop gun, fatally shooting cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, the weapon passed through the hands of two other people on set: the firearms specialist and an assistant director.

An affidavit filed by a Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office detective states that armorer Hannah Gutierrez had set up three prop guns in a gray cart that, because of pandemic restrictions, was kept outside a church-like building where filming of the western “Rust” was taking place in New Mexico. Assistant director Dave Halls grabbed one and took it to Baldwin.

“Cold gun,” Halls yelled, according to the court record, indicating it did not contain a live round.

Unbeknown to him, the affidavit states, it did.

How what should have been a safe prop gun ended up firing a shot that killed Hutchins, 42, and injured the film’s director, Joel Souza, 48, is now at the center of the investigation into a shooting that has sparked debate about safety on sets. In the days since, some directors have begun calling on the industry to stop using firearms on set — including prop guns filled with blanks.

“We’ve been using the blanks less and less, and now it just felt like given what happened, any risk is too much risk at this point,” Alexi Hawley, a showrunner for the popular ABC police drama “The Rookie,” told The Washington Post on Saturday. Hawley announced Friday that no live firearms would be used while filming going forward. “There is no reason to use them anymore,” he said.

Deputies with the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department were dispatched to the Bonanza Creek Ranch on Thursday after crew members called 911, describing a chaotic scene in which two people were hit by a prop gun firing during a rehearsal.

“We need immediate help,” said a woman who identified herself as a script supervisor in a recording of the call obtained by the Associated Press.

When Deputy Nicholas LeFleur arrived, he discovered Hutchins had been shot in the chest and Souza in the shoulder. Hutchins was airlifted to a hospital, where she died; Souza was transported by ground and later released. Meanwhile, police secured the scene, with Gutierrez handing deputies the gun that had fired.

Baldwin, who was wearing Western-style clothing during his scene, changed attire and handed over his costume to investigators.

“These clothes appear to have blood stains,” the affidavit says.

Neither Gutierrez nor Halls immediately responded to requests for comment Saturday. A spokesperson for Baldwin told The Post on Saturday that he was not doing interviews.

Santa Fe-area District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies said the investigation is still in a preliminary stage and it is unknown whether charges will be filed.

“We will look into all facts and evidence of the case with great discretion,” she said.

In the days leading up to the fatal incident, there were troubling signs regarding safety on the set. Two crew members told the Los Angeles Times that Baldwin’s stunt double had fired two rounds Oct. 16 from a gun he had been told was “cold.” Hours before Thursday’s shooting, several crew members walked off the production in protest over what they saw as subpar conditions and unpaid work, the Times reported.

Some of those tensions were apparent in the 911 call. The script supervisor said the “AD,” or assistant director, had yelled at her during lunch, asking about revisions.

“He’s supposed to check the guns,” she said. “He’s responsible for what happens on the set.”

Rust Movie Productions, the company overseeing filming, said in a statement they had not been alerted of the concerns and that “safety of our cast and crew is the top priority.”

“Though we were not made aware of any official complaints concerning weapon or prop safety on set, we will be conducting an internal review of our procedures while production is shut down,” the company told media outlets.

Despite the apparent danger, some filmmakers insist on using live prop guns, saying they more closely capture the sound and look of a weapon firing than computer-generated imaging.

Bill Davis, a veteran film-set armorer, said Saturday that it was almost certain that Hutchins had been killed by a bullet. Blanks fire wax plugs, he said, which dissolve from the heat of firing and would not be able to penetrate a bone or inner organ — though at a distance of under 20 feet, particles from a blank can cause skin and eye damage.

Rule No. 1 for armorers, he said, is never to allow live ammunition on a set.

“It’s basic stuff,” he said. “How did that live round get on set? You shall not have live ammunition on a movie set, ever. It’s not a may — it’s a shall.”

In a recent podcast interview, Gutierrez, going by the name Hannah Reed, described working as head armorer for the first time in a film featuring Nicolas Cage. The 24-year-old said that as the daughter of Thell Reed, a well-known Hollywood armorer, she had grown up around guns, though admitted she felt anxious about her first time as head armorer.

“I was really nervous about it at first, and I almost didn’t take the job because I wasn’t sure I was ready,” she said. “But doing it, it went very smoothly.”

Armorers handle all weapons on film, TV, and stage productions, providing safety instruction to other members of the crew and cast. There are no degree programs to train them, with most serving apprenticeships for a year or so.

Certification regulations for armorers vary widely from state to state, ranging from strict to nonexistent. Even in states with well-defined regulations, however, such as California, there’s often little enforcement, Davis said.

In New Mexico, according to a post on the website of Local 480 IATSE, the film technicians’ union, a licensed armorer must be on set when weapons are used.

Jeffrey Harris, a lawyer in Savannah, Ga., who has represented victims of film-set injuries, said every film set has posted safety bulletins, and proper handling of weapons is always right at the top. It’s not that new laws are needed, he said, but that existing rules have to be obeyed.

If crews follow basic safety precautions — no ammunition allowed, no guns directed at people, redundant checks to be sure chambers and barrels are clear — “everybody should be fine,” he said.

“It just seems this is a pretty clear violation of basic firearm safety,” he said.

Mike Lubke, a fight choreographer for films and theater based in St. Paul, Minn., said that staging gunplay in a cramped indoor setting — such as the set building where Hutchins was killed — requires extra care.

He said it is essential to have as few crew members in the room as possible. The crew should make sure no one is in the firing lane. And they should carefully choreograph the movement of the gun before and after it is fired, because sometimes actors’ trigger fingers slip prematurely, and sometimes, especially with blanks, the discharge can be delayed.

If the camera does not have to move, even the camera operator can be elsewhere.

“I’ll admit, you can’t always optimize the situation,” he said. “There’s always some give and take.”

Lubke also pointed out that guns can be modified by a gunsmith so that they will accept blanks but not bullets, but productions don’t always go to that trouble and expense.

Hutchins was considered a rising star in the cinematographer world and leaves behind a young son and husband, who shared a tribute to his wife on Twitter.

“Halyna inspired us all with her passion and vision, and her legacy is too meaningful to encapsulate in words,” Matt Hutchins wrote. “Our loss is enormous.”

The IATSE Local 600 tweeted that it would host candlelight vigils for Hutchins on Saturday and Sunday nights in Albuquerque and Los Angeles, respectively.

Baldwin has said his “heart is broken” for Hutchins’s family.

“There are no words to convey my shock and sadness regarding the tragic accident that took the life of Halyna Hutchins, a wife, mother and deeply admired colleague of ours,” he tweeted Friday.

In his first remarks since the shooting, Souza told Deadline he was “gutted” by Hutchins’s death.

“She was kind, vibrant, incredibly talented, fought for every inch, and always pushed me to be better,” he said. “My thoughts are with her family at this most difficult time.”

Alec Baldwin has always insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he didn’t pull that trigger.

The FBI now says that he did. That finding, released over the weekend, comes just after the Santa Fe Sheriff’s Office announced it’s only waiting for Baldwin’s phone records before sending its investigative file to the DA’s office.

Are the walls closing in yet, Alec?

This FBI report is reason to cheer. Not since OJ Simpson have we seen someone so guilty act so aggrieved, entitled, put-upon and victimized, as if this whole tragedy has affected no one more than Baldwin himself — not Halyna Hutchins’ husband, not her little boy, so traumatized after her death that he couldn’t speak for days, but Alec freaking Baldwin.

Think that’s overstatement? Let me count the ways: Gallivanting through the Hamptons and Vermont, just days after the shooting, Baldwin shopping at Ralph Lauren and preening before the paps — you know, the ones he otherwise hates and physically attacks — so they could get the perfect shot of Baldwin, inside a gleaming restaurant, holding his head in his hands. The bizarre roadside presser with his fake Spanish wife, the Rachel Dolezal of the Hamptons, in which he claimed the “Rust” set was run by “a very, very well-oiled crew” who just had the bad luck to suffer this “one in a trillion” tragedy.

The barrage of social media posts in the days after, Hilaria and Alec gloating over their family — that is, when Hilaria wasn’t getting in on the victim act herself, writing that “parenting through this has been an intense experience, to say the least.”

Know what else will be an intense experience? Criminal charges, jail time, and the loss of all his money in civil litigation. (On Monday, the New Mexico medical investigator ruled the shooting an accident; the district attorney has yet to decide whether to file charges.)

Did I mention that the Baldwins thought there was no better time to buy a sprawling, historic Vermont farmhouse for $1.75 million?

That’s how delusional these two are. How surely they believe Alec to be above the law or any consequence.

As two firearms experts in on-set safety told me last year: Guns don’t fire themselves. Alec Baldwin, for all his caterwauling and crocodile tears, pulled that trigger and killed Halyna Hutchins.

“I’m not aware of any gun firing itself,” veteran Hollywood firearms expert Steve Wolf told me last December, after Alec’s poor-me softball sit-down with ABC’s George Stephanopolous — his good pal from the Hamptons social scene, not that either disclosed that little conflict of interest.

“The trigger still must have been pressed,” Wolf said. “It’s really important to discredit anyone who claims that guns fire themselves. If this becomes an acceptable defense, there goes any accountability when it comes to shooting people. We can’t have this kind of ‘Guns shoot themselves’ thing. They don’t.”

Former FBI agent-turned-Hollywood firearms consultant Bobby Chacon told me the same thing.

“The bullet striking and killing that woman came out of the barrel of the gun pointed directly at her,” Chacon said. “Bullets don’t curve. He isn’t in ‘The Matrix.’ The trigger would still have to be pulled.”

Alec, to Stephanopolous: “I would never point a gun at anyone and pull the trigger at them. Never.” Also, he was brazen enough to say he felt no guilt.

This was the same interview in which Baldwin claimed Hutchins told him to point the gun at her. “Everything is at her direction,” he said. “I’m holding the gun where she told me to hold it, which ended up right below her armpit.”

So which is it, Alec? You’d never point a gun at anyone, or you pointed the gun at Hutchins because she told you to? And if it’s the latter, what are we to infer — that Hutchins is to blame for you pulling the trigger and shooting her to death?

It’s all so vile, but take heart: As a producer on “Rust,” Baldwin may also share blame for the rookie mistakes and cost-cutting that led up to this tragedy. Don’t forget that on the morning Hutchins was killed, seven crew members walked off the set over safety concerns.

At least one had sounded the alarm to the unit production manager, at one point texting, “We’ve now had three accidental discharges. This is super unsafe.”

It’s easy to see how such standard safety protocols went ignored and how dire warnings were shrugged off. As the old saying goes, the fish rots from the head, and Baldwin, as we’ve all seen over the past year, lives in a reality of his own making: His wife, née Hillary Thomas from Boston, is, through sheer force of make-believe and some bronzer, Spanish. His great friend Woody Allen is just misunderstood.

And, of course, it’s totally proper to brag about your happy family life incessantly on Instagram while ignoring your part in destroying another young family.

In Baldwin’s demented worldview, anyone who thinks he’s responsible for the death of a beautiful young wife and mother, her whole life and career ahead of her, must be motivated by animus or greed. Even the widower.

“What you have is a certain group of people, litigants and whatever” — ! — “on whatever side, who, their attitude is, ‘Well, the people who likely seem negligent have no money, and the people who have money are not negligent.’ ”

This was Baldwin in March, weeks after Hutchins’ widower filed his civil suit against Baldwin and went on the “Today” show, calmly expressing his justifiable anger over Baldwin’s interview with Stephanopolous.

“Hearing him blame Halyna in the interview and shift responsibility to others and seeing him cry about it — I just feel, are we really supposed to feel bad about you, Mr. Baldwin?”

Hutchins went on to state the obvious, which again continues to elude Baldwin — Baldwin, who prides himself on being smarter than the average Hollywood duck, what with his one-time NPR show and his bestselling memoir and his coverage in The New Yorker and telling the New York Times that he was qualified to be governor of New York. Oh, and his liberal bona fides with his “SNL” spoofs of Donald Trump, a man he has more in common with than he could ever admit.


Lest there remain any doubt as to who Alec Baldwin really is, consider these text messages between Baldwin and Matt Hutchins — whom Baldwin was so quick to befriend in the hours after the shooting.

Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2021, after Hutchins reaches out to Baldwin:

AB: I am with my kids.

!!!!!!!

AB: Your attorney told me not to contact you. So . . . what’s up?

What’s up? That says it all. That’s Baldwin saying: Why are you bothering me, what could you possibly have to say, can’t we just do this through lawyers, what are you, sad or something?

AB: Make sure you tell your lawyer that you reached out to me and not vice versa.

MH: Of course. You can always text me if you have something on your mind.

AB: Your lawyer sent a variant of a cease and desist to me. Told me not to contact you. So, there’s that.

How callous. How heartless — especially for someone who has spent the past 10 months begging for sympathy and understanding.

Karma isn’t a big enough concept to describe what Alec Baldwin has coming. Fortunately for decent people everywhere, sloppy emotional ploys and disgusting attempts to blame the victim do not apply to the criminal justice system, the FBI, or the laws of physics.

So, you know, there’s that.

https://nypost.com/2022/08/15/walls-close-in-on-alec-baldwin-as-his-gun-lie-falls-apart/ 


Bang bang shoooot....

It'll be interesting how much justice Baldwin can afford to avoid.

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Single action revolvers can have REALLY light triggers, but you still have to put your finger on it and apply pressure or it never fires...

wasn't there some brand of gun that was shooting cops in their own legs while holstered not long ago?

Thats called improper training

had to go back to check if I had a false memory...

Si Sauer P320.
42 since 2016 covering 22 states.
At least one involved a cop shot in her department headquarters by the gun in her purse while she sat and talked.

Not gonna bother looking for other types, just saying it's been proven to happen.

Baldwin...? none of us has a Clue what happened.

That was the model Defund 500.

hey, I wouldn't know a sig sauer from sauer kraut, but apparently more than a few have fired with no one touching the trigger.
There ain't enough training in the world to prevent a fault built into the product.

and once again, no idea if this specific brand failure relates to Baldwin but should at least keep people uncertain until we know.

In (more than) one thread I'm supposed to laugh at the FBI, until the FBI supports what I hope to be true...?
Very confusing.