There's no good reason to use a functional gun in film and theater, change my mind.
The only reason to do it is verisimilitude, and that's not compelling because a fake is easy enough to acquire/create.
In 2024 having a real firearm on set is unconscionable. Especially without a proper armorist. This was not only avoidable, but the situation shouldn’t have even presented itself.
Actors miming shooting looks ridiculous. Like laser tag guns. Actual recoil looks much more realistic.
❌When the recoil looks fake
✔️Action hero only ever gets shot in shoulder despite thousands of rounds shot at them, bullets used by bad guys never hollow point
The must be a way to create "false" gun in the sense that they only takes blanks and have nonfunctional barrels. Or I'm I too optimistic?
Unfortunately, guns are deceptively simple. Just about anything that can detonate a realistic looking blank is capable of firing an actual bullet. And even if it's just a blank, any obstruction in the barrel can end up becoming an ad-hoc projectile by the force. Every once in a while, you have that happen in Civil War re-enactments.
We could get around this by having specific calibers that only come in blanks.
Not really though because still, if anything is in the barrel, it becomes a projectile.
Ok but that's a separate issue and something that can happen with a regular gun loaded with a regular caliber blank, what they're saying is fake guns for movies should use a caliber for which no bullets exist, solving the main part of the issue, i.e. the fact that someone can load a normal bullet in a gun that is to be used as a prop.
Thats also how Brandon Lee died. Iirc there was a squib malfunction that they didn't notice so when they shot a blank, the round was pushed out and killed him.
If the armorer wasn't willfully negligent it wouldn't be a problem. Not a problem for the vast majority of film sets. Just pure lack of professionalism from the armorer whose sole core responsibility is to ensure safety.
if Baldwin wasn't waiving a gun around like a moron, a negligent armorer wouldn't have been a problem, either.
the armorer being negligent (and she was), doesn't mean that Baldwin wasn't also being negligent. and lets be perfectly clear: the reason Gutierrez-Reed was hired over other more professional armorers is precisely because she was "less professional"- or more bluntly, because she was willing to not insist on proper safety protocols that caused delays in shooting.
Woah woah woah. Baldwin should be allowed to do whatever the fuck he wants with a prop gun. If an armorer gives him a gun on a set, why would he reasonably believe it was able to hurt or kill someone?
If an actor is given a prop pipe bomb, and he throws it at a cast member in jest and it explodes...because the explosive expert gave him a live explosive why the fuck is that the actors fault?
Why is is Alec's fault he was horsing around with what effectively should have been a toy. It should have been a fancy cap gun at worst.
Woah woah woah. Baldwin should be allowed to do whatever the fuck he wants with a prop gun. If an armorer gives him a gun on a set, why would he reasonably believe it was able to hurt or kill someone?
because it's a fucking weapon. he knew it was a weapon.
secondly, it was Hall (another producer) that gave him the weapon, not HGR.
thirdly, you don't fuck around with even the non-firing propguns precisely because of how easy it is to mistake them. He fucked around, and Alyna Hutchins found out. Ergo, it's negligent homicide
Hate to say it, but I agree here.
This is the price paid for not treating real guns with respect. Prop bullets or otherwise.
Wouldn't the live round have shot someone no matter what? The point of a blank round is so you can aim a gun at someone and not kill them.
Uhm.
That’s not how Blanks work
And even if there is some how no wadding They can still be lethal
You cannot render a functional weapon (blank firing or “real” or whatever you want to call it,) totally safe.
Which is why you should always treat them as something that will kill you given half the chance. (It was literally made to do just that.)
And you should always treat look alikes as if they were real because a) they’re easy to mistake for real ones and vice versa and b) the other people may not realize it’s a prop. (On a movie set, unlikely, but you never know who’s around and how they will respond. Or where an active shooter is going to appear.)
As for the cartridges, usually there’s tell tales of one sort or another. For dummy rounds it’s common to press the otherwise empty cartridge with a ball bearing or two so they rattle when shaken. Sometimes they also have a small hole on the wall of the casing
Blanks are, by their nature, lacking the bullet and the top is simply crimped to hold the wadding.
All it would have taken was a proper inspection to verify that it was unloaded/loaded with dummy rounds. Or, alternatively, Baldwin not pointing it at people.
Which leads me to the final thing you should always do: check the damn weapon. Don’t trust armorers. They’re people, too. They make mistakes, they fuck up.
Can I ask what the point of this screed was? I'm aware blanks are dangerous. That's irrelevant. There was a real bullet in the chamber. At some point, even if it was a blank, it would have been pointed at someone and the trigger pulled.
The point appears to be "check the damn weapon", which of course you could have said without 'educating' me, and wouldn't have been undercut with going on endlessly about wadding.
That point is a terrible one because the armourer is the expert, and is the one who should be signing the gun off as safe every time it is opened, not an actor who neither is required to have qualifications nor skills in clearing a gun as safe. If an actor interferes with the weapon, the armourer has to check it again.
HGR definitely didn't do right here but a lot more went wrong. This was a perfect storm of negligence. Multiple people could have taken minor stands to have prevented this tragic tale. So many people spoke out and zero action was taken to address their concerns.
A layered safety approach is a great idea. But it only works when at least one person in a position to do so does what's right.
What recoil? They are shooting blanks. There is no mass leaving the gun. If you want to cycle the gun on trigger pull in a realistic yet safe way, compressed CO2 can be used. Some movie guns are even electrically/magnetically actuated.
I mean 5-10 grams of vaporized gunpowder leaves the barrel at fairly high speed. It's not a lead round but it's not nothing. Also the spent brass being ejected is not easy to CGI convincingly.
You do know how physics works, right? There is an explosion in the chamber that moves the slide/bolt backward to rack another round of course there will be recoil. Have you ever fired a black powder gun with no bullet in it? There is still a recoil.
We gotta sometimes kill a bunch of people on set, because americans need their religion represented correctly
Who cares?
Modify the dang things so they can’t take real ammo. Make it keyed somehow or odd shaped. Problem solved.
It’s funny I recently bumped into a guy who is a gunsmith and worked in Hollywood sets before so we talked about this. There are reasons to have a fully functional gun on set and the different rounds they use on set because there are a bunch of different types depending on the scene and lighting. They use different charges for different shots and a bunch of other things. Especially if it’s a practical effects movie.
The issue is making sure live ammo is not on set or around the guns on set. If you have access to these guns you can use them after filming is done with live rounds.
Alex trusted the people around him to do their jobs and they didn’t make it a safe set. This is like flipping the keys to Dodge Hellcat to your 15 1/2 year old son with a learners driving permit and his 18 year old friend riding shotgun. It’s not a good idea. They should be driving Kia Sportage.
With all the money spent on films, I'm amazed there isn't regulated "Hollywood" caliber firearms. Something incapable of chambering anything on the market, and only functions with the certified blanks.
Something akin to the way fake currency is controlled.
I'd argue otherwise. Their can be. It's not required, but it's the difference of using CGI or practical effects. John Wick didn't use real guns, but it's the perfect case for that. It's fast action with a lot going on, so you'll never notice that it's fake. I would argue more intimate shots it can make sense to use a real firearm.
They shouldn't be used where it's possible to avoid, and even when it can't be avoided aiming it at someone should be avoided. There should also be checks and double checks to ensure there isn't a live round, and the actor should also be trained to handle the weapon and check there isn't a live round before using it as well. There is no reason something like this should have been possible, but I don't agree there is no use for using a real firearm ever on set.
The key word is functional. Make it physically/mechanically incapable of firing. I've been in stage productions that used non-functioning firearms working on my undergrad. They were still locked away. The professor who was the technical director and armorer was the only one who had a key to that safe. They handed it to the props master who handed it to the actor. When the prop wasn't in use during the run, the props master had it on their person. When the performance was over, it immediately when back into the safe and locked away. If it is absolutely necessary for it to function then only blanks and only in use when needed. Not using it to play a prank. Not using it to fire rounds after the shoot is over. Baldwin and the armorer are absolutely at fault here for failing to maintain safety protocols.
Preach.
If you don’t have an armorer in your production than you shouldn’t have anything remotely akin to a firearm period. If your production is too broke for one, you’re too broke to simulate a firearm practically. Plain and simple.
I work in film. No functional gun is needed on set.
There's an entire industry surrounding the production of (often incredibly) realistic not-firing (and blank-firing) prop guns. the only time you'd need a real one, firing real bullets is if you were doing some extremely-close up shots or recording sound. Even then, you'd only need the real bullets for sound effects or close ups of actually firing. The only thing you'd really need CGI for is the muzzle flash. which is so short and so slow most people would barely even notice if it was merely 'realistic'.
All of which, it should be said, could have been shot with no one down range of the weapon at any time, and in any case, there was zero reason to need a functional firearm at the time of the shooting. They were not actually filming. They were setting up the cameras and checking for things like glare and reflections and various other angles. All of that could have done with a non-firing prop with no danger to anyone at all.
This was always a political bag of bullshit. They even had to fund it as a special prosecution with legislation, going so far as to assign a special prosecutor that happened to also be a state Republican legislator.
The gymnastics people keep using to align blame for manslaughter onto Bladwin have slowly become accepted as if it is factual like propaganda is meant to do.
Yeah been following the rust cases closely.
Kari Morrissey was the one who secured the conviction for Hannah Gutierrez Reid.
Important things to note for Alec Baldwin's case: he's got more money and resources for his defense. There's a bunch of high class attorneys that entered appearance for Baldwin. But he has 2 major problems: those attorneys are not from new Mexico. A good lawyer knows the law and a great lawyer knows the judge. Additionally, he is known for being bad at safety and security. That was already becoming clear in HGR's trial. But legally things are bad as well: he held the weapon. Now in other states that doesn't make him more culpable than HGR, but in new Mexico basically everyone holding a weapon is held accountable for the consequences of whatever they do while holding the weapon. This, together with what I would predict are looking like pretty bad facts for him rn, is an indication that he has a steep climb to make, unless Morrissey fucks up in a major way.
Pretty solid summarization of the situation. I definitely think that Baldwin's on site safety problems and the seemingly rushed nature of production are going to bite him.
I think lying about pulling the trigger will become an issue as well.
Remember that this occured during a strike, and Baldwin brought in scabs to fill the positions, and then pushed one of those scabs to be the fallguy, despite baldwin being both the one in the position of power, and the one who fired the gun without checking it was loaded.
It's not the actor's job to check if a prop is a functional weapon. They have other things to be focusing on.
But since he hired the people and set the policies, he's still responsible.
It is the job of anyone handling a dangerous object to handle it safely. If they can't, they shouldn't.
The point of an armorer on set is that they ensure that the guns aren't dangerous. The typical rules about "don't aim at something you don't want to destroy" doesn't apply in a movie because otherwise all the action sequences would look dumb with people firing wildly at the ground. How stupid would it look if John Wick shoots at the floor and blood spurts out of the guys face.
That said, anyone who hires a scab armorer gets what they pay for and deserve to be prosecuted.
Safety is the duty of every employee (and employer) on any job site. Film set, factory floor, or office. You have a duty to not unduly endangered your coworkers. If you see something dangerous at your work place speak up. Make your complaint known and make sure there's a paper trail.
The four rules of firearm safety only fail if you break every one at once. And much like punches Hollywood is great at getting camera angles where you really can't tell the difference with gunshots.
The rules about don't aim at something you don't want to destroy absolutely apply because it was a real gun. That rule applies even when you know the gun is unloaded because you checked it yourself. Been shooting 45 years (I'm 50) and no problems ever because I was taught and follow the safety rules.
It is the job of anyone handling a firearm to handle it in a safe and responsible manner.
You don’t get to pull “not my job” when you were holding the firearm that killed someone.
Especially since the normal on set was so far below the industry standard - a fact I would expect somebody with is broad and extensive experience to know as a qualified actor.
He had a duty of care to check the weapon and to handle it safely and he didn’t.
He had a duty of care to not point a fucking lethal weapon at people, and he did.
(This is in addition to potential liability as a producer and a duty of care to ensure workplace safety.)
To be fair, I have never seen an American who had a gun not act like a goof.
Guns are deadly. I cannot count the times that I found an "unloaded" gun, both mine and others, that was found to contain a cartridge over the years. People get excited, they forget it was loaded, they get distracted, cartridges can get stuck when unloading. I can tell you stories that will make you cringe.
I cannot count the times that I found an "unloaded" gun, both mine and others, that was found to contain a cartridge over the years.
You know what's interesting? I can count exactly how many times I've experienced this. It's zero. Zero times.
I mean really, imagine making a statement like that as if it's a normal thing for a private citizen of a modern society to say.
So many insecure people too afraid to face the real world without the ability to end human lives in a split second.
Please stop doing things that create those stories. For your safety and everyone elses.
Start by having someone that actually knows how to handle firearms take them away from you.
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