While I largely agree, I still don’t fully agree. He should have treated it as loaded because it’s a gun, but I also understand why he didn’t. There are many dangerous facets in our lives where we trust professionals, like doctors and pilots and chefs. Professionals that count on other professionals doing their job and keeping the whole system running.
You can extra prepare, and argue that everyone should at all times, but its also entirely reasonable that we dont run background checks on pilots or breathalyze them before they get onto a plane. We expect the system to work for many dangerous things, and it almost always does. The fact that it almost always does is part of the issue here, because believing the armorer was doing their job to keep people safe is a reasonable assumption.
Should he have applied extra caution to checking that gun? You bet. Do I think he was complacent because of the systems they had on set for gun safety? Yes. Do I think that rises to murder or even extreme negligence? No. It was a lapse in judgement that ended with him killing a person, and that is terrible, but not criminal.
But he wasn’t just a passenger like someone going on vacation. That person would have very little power to do anything about a pilot being possibly high or drunk.
Baldwin was more like the copilot to the drunk captain. He had plenty of power to say something was wrong, and had the responsibility to double check.
If your plane crashed because Captain Morgan the drunk ace missed a safety check, and you and the copilot survived, you would just shrug and say “well we all rely on professionals and this one just slipped through the cracks” you don’t think the copilot has any responsibility for not saying anything or at least double checking the pilot and speaking up if something didn’t look right?
We can trust dangerous things because there’s many people out there that do have jobs that involve double checking other people’s work. A commercial pilot has a copilot who shares the work, monitors instruments, and makes sure the checklists get followed properly. Doctors have nurses that help asses the patient for everything from symptoms to verifying if it’s the right or left leg that’s getting cut off today. Chefs have city health inspectors whose whole job is to come in and make sure the kitchen is clean and they aren’t serving rat shit in with the chili.
So when your job involves guns: famous for being rapidly deadly things, shouldn’t it fall on somebody to at least take a peak and make sure everything looks in order? And just like the pilot and copilot have to make sure the plane is in working order because it’s their responsibility, the actor who is going to be holding the gun should check it and speak up because the gun is their responsibility.
