That seems to contradict the article:
Special prosecutor Kari T. Morissey argued that “the actor has responsibility for the firearms once it is in their hands.”
The prosecutor is explicitly arguing that he has responsibility because he was holding the gun.
he did. You hold any weapon in your hand, and use it in an irresponsible manner, you’re responsible.
yes, even if an ‘expert’ tells you it’s safe. he had enough wherewithal to know it’s a weapon inherently designed to kill. and to be perfectly blunt, it wasn’t even necessary that he carry a real firearm with dummies. they weren’t filming. they were setting up shots, checking angles and such…
and he should have had enough professional experience to know, you don’t pass guns around like that on a set. it’s controlled by a single person whose responsible for it, and it’s either locked up, being held by that one person, or being actively used by the actor.
The way it works on a movie set is that the weapons master is supposed to check to make sure the weapon is 100% safe if the trigger is pulled and then hands it to the actor. The actor has to be in the head space to do their role properly, which would not include worrying about whether or not the gun is loaded since, in their mind, it’s loaded. That’s exactly why the job of weapons master exists. In this case, it’s the weapons master who fucked up. Baldwin fucked up by creating unsafe workplace practices, not because he pulled the trigger.
Gutierrez-Reed was likely specifically hired because she was inexperienced. Movie sets are chaotic, the work is fast paced and rushed, and safety protocols slow things down. As they say: Time is money. She may not have specifically been hired by Baldwin, but she wasn’t really in a position to push back against it. (she should have, and she’s every bit as negligent.)
However, Baldwin has had a long, long acting career, much of it handling firearms. He- as a professional actor- should have known what the protocols should have been, and should have said something like “hey, you’re not the armorer”, when Dave Halls handed him the pistol.
What a lot of people seem to be misunderstanding is that more than one person can be responsible. Gutierrez-Reed, Halls, Baldwin were all negligent in a variety of ways.
The simplest of ways to have prevented this was to not be using a functional fire arm. There are movie props that are near-perfect replicas (and, on film, would look perfect.) without being capable of firing. This is particularly true considering they weren’t doing live shoots. they were doing blocking, which is a process by where they set up the cameras and check for issues. One of the issues they should have been looking for is, “is this a safe direction to point the gun”.
if you need any more reason to realize you can’t ever assume a firearm, or any other weapon, is “100% safe”, I suggest you give Anna Hutchin’s family a call.
as for his “headspace” do you really think it’s normal for actors to be totally, completely and wholly unaware of what they’re doing? that in fight scenes they’re actually fighting, rather than following a script in perfect choreography? that they’re allowed to not pay attention to safety? No. Every one is always most concerned with safety. Or they should be. yes. that includes the actors.
Completely different scenarios. In yours the person hurts themselves. In this case Baldwin hurt someone else, allegedly due to his own negligence.
Closer to: Worker drives forklift around blindfolded. Hits someone killing them. It’s both the managers fault and blindfold guy.
I will be interested to see the angle the prosecution takes. I think there’s a real sense of embarrassment from the authorities on this one, and they’re trying to make sure they don’t look like they’re sweeping it under the rug to mollify the Hollywood people, but it’s a case with pretty big holes. Since it’s “only” involuntary manslaughter, I wonder if the angle they’ll take is that there’s a legitimate question of fact that even an actor could see that the armorer was a disaffected nepobaby who was bad at her job, and the production wasa chaotic mess, and that all this raised the bar for how Baldwin should have proceeded.
