Fewer than three weeks before actor Alec Baldwin is due to go on trial in Santa Fe, New Mexico, prosecutors have said that he “engaged in horseplay with the revolver”, including firing a blank round at a crew member on the set of Rust before the tragic accident occurred.
Baldwin is facing involuntary manslaughter charges in the 2021 shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
In new court documents, prosecutors said they plan to bring new evidence to support their case that the 66-year-old actor and producer was reckless with firearms while filming on the set and displayed “erratic and aggressive behavior during the filming” that created potential safety concerns.
Prosecutors in the case, which is due to go to trial on 10 July, have previously alleged that to watch Baldwin’s conduct on the set of Rust “is to witness a man who has absolutely no control of his own emotions and absolutely no concern for how his conduct affects those around him”.
In the latest filing, special prosecutors Kari Morrissey and Erlinda Johnson allege that Baldwin pointed his gun and fired “a blank round at a crew member while using that crew member as a line of site as his perceived target”.
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.
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.