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Interesting! Thanks for the clarification. Gun safety etiquette dictates that the handler is always responsible for their own ammo. Alec the actor should defin

Interesting! Thanks for the clarification. 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.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
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.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

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.