After reading the article I wanted to know what is gained by shaking a bullet in front of the actor (this was not done but someone is quoted as saying it's standard practice)?
I found this which shows comparisons of bullets and blanks. There is a mention in one of the posts of BBs being installed to give a rattle. It says blanks are not to be used at close range and not to be pointed at anyone. A cold gun is supposed to be an unloaded gun and not a gun with a blank?
But what stands out is how blanks and shotshell look the same.
If the accident on the set used a bullet, that should have been visibly noticeable. The call was that it was a cold gun, but the article doesn't give an example of what was used. Anyone have info on that?
The actor wouldn't. The producer who let live ammo anywhere near a set would.
He's being charged as the head of production, not as the actor who was unfortunate enough to pull the trigger. The fact that he's both is just a cruel twist of fate.
According to CNN [1] this is not true. Baldwin is facing charges for his direct actions as an actor (who pulled the trigger) and as the producer. I imagine this will be very confusing for a jury to unpack, and I think it’s unfortunate. To quote the DA:
Other actors — including "A-list" celebrities — consulted by prosecutors said they "always check their guns or have someone check it in front of them," Carmack-Altwies told CNN shortly after announcing her intention to file involuntary manslaughter charges. Every person that handles a gun has a duty to make sure that if they're going to handle that gun, point it at someone and pull the trigger, that it is not going to fire a projectile and kill someone," she said. She added, "An actor does not get a free pass just because they are an actor. That is what is so important. We are saying here in New Mexico, that everyone is equal under the law."
The piece goes on to note that the “criminal liability as a producer” case would have different requirements than the “criminal liability as an actor” case, presumably because one case would need to argue that on-set safety was actually Baldwin’s responsibility and he was specifically negligent in that duty. But based on the DA’s quotes it looks like she is going for a very broad theory of liability that mixes the two roles up (ie as the producer he should have known to take special care when handed a cold gun as an actor.) It says that CNN’s legal expert found the case to be very unusual, FWIW. I’ll be honest that this case has a whiff of “small town DA wanting to get a bigger political profile” to it, but I guess we’ll see.
This may be that the prosecutor thinks they have a case for producers, and then piled speculative charges in top for intimidation. Or, in this specific case where actor Baldwin knew the selfsame producer Baldwin was negligent regarding safety, he shouldn't have known better. A different actor who was not also producer might not have caught a charge.
Gun safety etiquette dictates that the handler is always responsible for their own ammo. Alec the actor should definitely not get a free pass. I didn't realize there were criminal ramifications too.
Alec the producer is guilty of a far worse crime IMO. It could have easily been someone else who pulled the trigger.
Standard gun safety procedures are excellent, but don’t really have any bearing here. Just as a professional chemical laboratory has different safety procedures (and responsibilities/expectations for workers) than, say, your house: a film set also has different expectations and safety procedures when it comes to weapons.
I’m no expert, but my understanding is that film sets need to allow actors to use guns in specific ways that would never be acceptable in normal gun ownership, such as to point (“cold”) props at people and pull the trigger. To enable this specialized usage the industry has developed a very specific set of safety standards tailored to this use-case. It involves hiring specially-trained professional armorers to manage all of the prop weapons on the set, and it also puts in place a new set of communication procedures to ensure that armorers can communicate with actors to let them know when they’re dealing with an unsafe weapon. From what I can tell, Baldwin the actor followed these safety procedures exactly as expected.
There is a separate question of whether Baldwin the executive producer has liability. To answer that you can’t just say “but he has a producer credit!” You’d need to actually show that (1) he had responsibility over hiring or on-set safety, and separately that (2) in that role he was negligent. It’s not really clear that an executive producer has that responsibility, usually it’s just a meaningless vanity credit.
What’s confusing about this case (from what I can tell) is that the DA realizes that both of these individual cases is kind of weak. And so instead she’s going for a hybrid case where Baldwin the actor followed the normal safety standards, but this isn’t sufficient because he somehow has to follow a non-standard (higher) set of safety standards because “as the producer he should have been aware that the professional armorer wasn’t trustworthy.” I’m not saying this argument is wrong, exactly. But I think it’s vague enough that it might allow a jury to disregard the legal safety requirements and invent new ones out of whole cloth.
PS I find this case fascinating and I don’t apologize for it! But I do apologize for the long post.
"cruel twist of fate." no Alec Baldwin was not responsible as both a producer and actor, now he is being held accountable as he was in every sense of the word responsible for manslaughter...even involuntarily.
Cruelty is reserved for the grief of the individual who had their life abruptly ended, and the grief of family of the deceased.
If you're going to pick up a weapon, point it at someone, and pull the trigger, what happens next is your responsibility, regardless of any other context.
If you aren't willing to learn the difference between dummy rounds, blanks, and live rounds, then you shouldn't be pointing firearms at people and pulling the trigger.
What law is there that defines this responsibility? Modern society operates on the idea of outsourced responsibility. Why are guns uniquely different? Why should we expect an actor to personally know about firearm safety and have a personal responsibility to ensure a firearm is in a safe state? A strange pattern I've seen in discussions around guns over the years, those with gun knowledge assume everyone has or should have the same knowledge. But this is unreasonable.
Your comment is unanswerable because the questions you ask contain within them assumptions that are false. Modern society does not rely on outsourced responsibility. Guns are not uniquely different. Negligence does not differ for actors. And the idea that people should handle firearms without becoming knowledgeable in them is total bull puckey.
EDITED TO ADD:
With the caveat that IANANML... the bottom line is that "Involuntary manslaughter consists . . . of a lawful act which might produce death . . . without due caution and circumspection." This is satisfied by "Negligent use of a deadly weapon [including] endangering the safety of another by handling or using a firearm or other deadly weapon in a negligent manner," which "means omitting to do something which a reasonable man, guided by those considerations which ordinarily regulate the conduct of human affairs, would do, or doing something which a prudent and reasonable man would not do."
A prudent and reasonable man would not point a loaded weapon at a cinematographer and pull the trigger, or even have his finger on the trigger, even in jest, and certainly not do so without verifying that the round in the chamber was a dummy round.
The fact that there had already been two negligent discharges mere days before makes this all the more repugnant. Not only was Baldwin negligent, he knew he was negligent, and did nothing to fix it.
>Modern society does not rely on outsourced responsibility
So you personally inspect your car for suitability, your food for safety, all amusement parks, buildings, tools, etc that you come into contact with? Yes, modern society would not be possible without outsourced responsibility.
>Negligence does not differ for actors.
Of course it does. Those with more knowledge and training are held to higher standards in specific contexts. That's why we have licensing and such. The question is how do guns fit into this context.
I'm a Harvard-trained lawyer with over 15 years of criminal litigation experience, including in homicide. I have a former client right now serving a sentence for involuntary manslaughter (he was originally charged with murder).
You don't need to listen to me. I have neither the ability nor the desire to force you to listen to me. But I promise you I know what I'm talking about.
Why does every discussion concerning emotionally charged issues devolve into some version of this? Why can't it just be about offering arguments to clarify the landscape?
This isn't about an emotionally charged issue. The discussion is about the legal test for negligence. It is an objective standard: what a reasonable person would do. The specifics of the individual are irrelevant.
But what does a "reasonable person" standard say when it comes to specialist knowledge? Why would a reasonable person not expect that an armorer who is responsible for ensuring the proper state of the gun is sufficient "due caution and circumspection"?
Responding to your edit, the issue reduces to what counts as "due caution and circumspection" for someone who isn't trained in the usage of firearms. Why is having an armorer who is responsible for ensuring the proper state of the gun not sufficient "due caution and circumspection"?
The way I see it, it’s not unlike the expression “Workplace safety rules are written in blood”. It’s taken a century of fatalities and refinement of procedures to come to the modern set of 4 gun safety rules. They exist because of those countless deaths over the years by those who didn’t follow them. The morality of it speaks for itself.
Given how much thought, refinement and bloodshed are behind those rules, to not follow them seems immoral. Anyone handling a gun has a moral obligation to following the safety rules. Do to otherwise is criminal negligence.
The issue isn't morality, but one of legal responsibility. What is the legal theory for an actor's personal responsibility to ensure the safety of a prop gun before using it?
The US has a kind of older code of guns organically and manufactured in organizations that need people to handle guns. If you are not careful I think you are going to talk past people from places where that code seems universal.
I.e. I can understand the perspective that not checking a gun you are handed is always gross negligence even though I have friends that I don't think would know that.
Agreed. If he wanted to have real firearms there, he needs to know how to operate real firearms. If he hired the armorer (or another person dedicated to firearms safety) to teach him how to do that, and they failed at that job, then the they should get their fair share of blame / repercussions. Which it sounds like they did, with a "negligent handling of a deadly weapon" or something.
Ultimately, though, as someone that is very familiar with guns, I have a hard time sympathizing with Baldwin. You brought real guns onto the set, and you pointed them at people. Primarily people that had no business having the guns pointed at them. It wasn't even another actor during filming, which I would have at least understood to some degree. It seems like the perfect storm of things had happened for him to "accidentally" kill this person he didn't like.
At the end of the day, any actors / set workers handling real firearms should have thorough training before using them. Trigger discipline, how to check the chamber, identifying cartridge types, emptying the chamber before setting it down, not aiming at people who aren't even actors...
> you pointed them at people. Primarily people that had no business having the guns pointed at them. It wasn't even another actor during filming, which I would have at least understood to some degree.
the scene involved pointing the gun towards the camera, which means the gun is pointing towards the crew.
> Trigger discipline
How do you maintain trigger discipline when the scene requires you to point a gun at someone, or in someones general direction, with your finger on the trigger?
> check the chamber, identifying cartridge types, emptying the chamber before setting it down
If an actor tries to check the chamber, messes with the cartridges, the gun immediately goes back to the armorer to be made safe before being handed back to the actor, if the actor check again, guess what happens?
It's very important to understand that on a film set the standard rules do not apply, or more precisely the rules apply in different ways.
Don’t forget that Baldwin (who I adore as an actor) has been vocally and voluntarily ignorant of guns and safe gun handling. He’s been one of these “I want nothing to do with them because they’re so dangerous, so I refuse to even learn about them and how to handle them safely”.
I hope this tragedy serves as a lesson for those who are “anti-gun” who seem to think there’s nobility in being willfully ignorant about a simple mechanical device.
He broke the first two of "The Four Rules of Gun Safety"
* All guns are always loaded
* Never point the gun at anything you are not willing to destroy.
* Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target (and you have made the decision to shoot).
* Be sure of your target and what is beyond it.
They are supposed to follow strict safety rules to prevent things like this happening, like guns being handed over only by the armorer (who wasn't even there in this instance).
I'm pretty sure that being the film's producer he is liable.
That kind of sucks, and I'm surprised a prosecutor is willing to risk their career.
However, this article has very strange wording in it, "Mr. Baldwin, [played] former President Donald J. Trump on "Saturday Night Live"", but later, "Ms. Reeb, the special prosecutor, who is also a Republican"; is NYT trying to accuse the prosecutor of making this political?
I think they actually might be trying to show that both Democrats and Republicans in New Mexico are in agreement on the issue, in an attempt to show that it is -not- political. I could be mistaken, but that's been my impression from other media in New Mexico.
There has been an increase of self-defense related shootings in New Mexico, and although the state has usually acknowledged some form of castle doctrine in your own home that isn't typically tempered by any duty to retreat. Gun violence, and crime in general, is fairly high in New Mexico, and is likely responsible for the increase of self-defense cases, but nevertheless, that state has been filing charges, or at least mulling them over in traditional self-defense instances.
I can't find the specific article I read back when this happened, but they all said something about the DA was debating on whether to file charges or not.
It may seem like Alec Baldwin may be a victim of this crackdown, and perhaps he is being used politically as a show of force in their effort to curb gun crime, but I think as the producer of this film, he would've been charged before the crackdown, and likely would faces charges in most states.
Inserting Trump in an article generates outrage...outrage is good for publications. I've noticed a lot of publications doing this, as in inserting politics into articles where it doesn't matter. I don't know who to blame; Trump the attention-seeking clown or the media orgs that give him the constant attention, whether positive or negative.
Specific to this article they're saying "the Republican special prosecutor has good reasons to do this (that aren't political)" to cut that argument off.
That's increasingly happening with YouTube videos for pop science and listicles. The creators just have to find some way to twist in some politics, usually with a snide or smug delivery, even if they don't have even a tangential relationship to the video's advertised subject matter. Usually, it's not about Trump but about various political and ideological causes currently popular with twentysomethings. Often it feels like the video was finished and someone went "Oh crap, we forgot to stick in some politics" and went back to add it in.
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I found this which shows comparisons of bullets and blanks. There is a mention in one of the posts of BBs being installed to give a rattle. It says blanks are not to be used at close range and not to be pointed at anyone. A cold gun is supposed to be an unloaded gun and not a gun with a blank?
https://www.quora.com/When-talking-about-bullets-or-rounds-w...
But what stands out is how blanks and shotshell look the same.
If the accident on the set used a bullet, that should have been visibly noticeable. The call was that it was a cold gun, but the article doesn't give an example of what was used. Anyone have info on that?