I have to come back to the issue of Alec Baldwin’s negligent discharge that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza because Baldwin recently said something thoroughly stupid that really illustrates his refusal to take responsibility for his own actions. Specifically:
Every film/TV set that uses guns, fake or otherwise, should have a police officer on set, hired by the production, to specifically monitor weapons safety.
He posted that both on his Twitter and Instagram. There’s a lot to unpack in that single sentence.
First off, “police officer” is not synonymous with “movie set gun expert”; in fact, police officers are not inherently gun experts at all (they’re famously not great at gun safety, either, in fact) and certainly not experts in the context of a movie set. Hiring a police officer to manage gun safety on your movie set is just completely stupid, particularly since there is already a system in place that covers gun safety with a person who is specifically an expert on movie set gun safety. That system works well when it is respected.
Second, we’ve learned a lot about how guns are handled on movie sets since I first posted about this, and though I don’t see anything wrong about my initial post, it is now clear that the people in control of production on the set of Rust were willing to cut corners to save money — and that includes all kinds of safety on set. They created a culture that shrugged off safety. For example, the armorer on the set (Hannah Gutierrez-Reed) claims that her duties were split between managing the weapons and helping the prop department, in clear violation of established movie set safety standards.
Would a whole police officer do a better job than half a movie armorer? Maybe! But when we consider how many other movies have been filmed with guns and didn’t injure anyone, it is clear that the established system for gun safety on movie sets works. In the last 50 years, there have only been approximately 4 injuries from guns on movie sets; many more people have died on movie sets from other causes. Whoever was actually in control of the “Rust” movie set is clearly responsible for the unsafe conditions. They were more concerned about saving a few dollars than human life, which is a common theme in capitalist enterprises; it is the reason why regulation is necessary. The gun safety standards on movie sets are not rules — they are optional; that should change.
Dwayne Johnson has, in the meantime, pledged to stop using real guns on the sets of his movies. This is a reasonable alternative since it eliminates the possibility of human negligence injuring a person on the set, and CGI is now effective enough that this will work. Most gun use in movies is so cartoonish that the detail provided by real firearms is really irrelevant; I think most gun people will agree that you shouldn’t use a gun as a tool if anything else will work instead. CGI is expensive, though, and I’m certain that low-budget projects like Rust will continue to use real guns because they are cheaper — unless they are compelled to stop doing that.
Despite the fact that everyone on the set of Rust was working in a context where human safety was not held to be as important as saving a little money, it is still also true that specific people were negligent, and I don’t know exactly who those people are. We might not ever know. However, it is certainly true that anyone who is handling a gun or even a thing that might be a gun needs to follow the rules of gun safety when doing so. Baldwin absolutely should have checked that gun before pulling the trigger and should have never pointed it at the cinematographer and director. Yes, I realize that he may not have known all that at the time, but he clearly knew it was a gun, and he clearly knew that a gun can kill people.
Liberals have these weird ideas about guns and violence. For example, they think guns are inevitably going to hurt someone just by existing and that there’s just nothing that can be done about it — basically, casting aside any personal responsibility they might have regarding any gun ever. In terms of violence, they seem to actually be afraid of their own capacity for violence, believing that anyone can become so angry that they might “lose control” and injure someone. In this self-infantilizing paradigm that they hold, the obvious solution is to get rid of all the guns, except for those in the possession of a cop, who becomes some kind of weird daddy figure for them.
In truth, guns don’t fire unless someone pulls the trigger, you’re not going to lose control when you get angry (an angry, violent person is typically performing both the anger and the violence — they aren’t out of control), a person who doesn’t generally fly into a violent rage probably never will, and a cop is someone who self-selected to do a job where violence is meted out against people who are less powerful. As taxpayers, we are all responsible for every gun in the possession of a government agent, be they a police officer, a soldier, or any other state-employed shooter.
But back to Alec Baldwin: What is the function of his announcement that he needs a daddy figure on set to take responsibility for the dangerous guns? Alec Baldwin does not want to take personal responsibility for his past negligence with a firearm, and does not want to ever take personal responsibility for a firearm (which really illustrates that he was probably not taking personal responsibility for the gun at the time of the incident). There’s a lot of responsibility for him to bear: Not only was he the person who actually shot two other human beings negligently, but he is also a producer for the movie. While it is unlikely that his executive producer title gave him any kind of managerial control of the set, it did give him the kind of authority that would allow him to insist on better safety standards.
His post also reveals that he didn’t really respect Rust’s armorer (Hannah Gutierrez-Reed). Since a movie armorer is obviously going to be an expert on movie set gun safety whereas a cop is not, there must be something else about the armorer that he thinks is a problem, and my guess is that he just didn’t respect her, and possibly even witnessed other people’s lack of respect for her. His lack of respect for this particular armorer clearly generalizes to a lack of respect for all of them. I’ve read accounts by other movie armorers about how they had to really push back against actors and other authorities on set in order to assure that safety protocols were respected — to the extent that it seems to me like they were risking being fired.
It may be that in a culture that is so disrespectful of armorers (and human safety, generally) that the Rust armorer might have been at a disadvantage due to being relatively new, relatively young, and a woman (to be clear, these are factors that may have made on-set managers believe they didn’t have to respect her, not flaws). She also really needed the producers to be happy with her work (again, because she was relatively new to the profession) so she may not have felt she could push back to the extent required; again, this is more about capitalism and managerial feudalism than her. She also may have fucked up, but this post is about Alec Baldwin, and everything I’m saying about the armorer is speculation related to why he thinks a cop is needed instead of just respecting the armorer.
Before Baldwin’s idiotic post about hiring a police officer, I felt bad for him. I assumed that he was taking personal responsibility for his part in killing a human being and seriously injuring another, but his post makes it clear that he is not. If you are apologizing or asking for forgiveness, the first step is to admit that you have hurt another person. Baldwin has not done this. Instead, his first response was to treat the accident as a completely random, inevitable event, and his second response has been to imply that someone else was to blame. Given that he has killed someone (and needs to obey the advice of his lawyer), I would also have accepted silence as an appropriate response.
Below is a related video by “Lucky Gunner”.