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Prosecutors say Alec Baldwin was ‘engaged in horseplay’ with gun before fatal shooting
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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Uhm.
That’s not how Blanks work
And even if there is some how no wadding They can still be lethal
You cannot render a functional weapon (blank firing or “real” or whatever you want to call it,) totally safe.
Which is why you should always treat them as something that will kill you given half the chance. (It was literally made to do just that.)
And you should always treat look alikes as if they were real because a) they’re easy to mistake for real ones and vice versa and b) the other people may not realize it’s a prop. (On a movie set, unlikely, but you never know who’s around and how they will respond. Or where an active shooter is going to appear.)
As for the cartridges, usually there’s tell tales of one sort or another. For dummy rounds it’s common to press the otherwise empty cartridge with a ball bearing or two so they rattle when shaken. Sometimes they also have a small hole on the wall of the casing
Blanks are, by their nature, lacking the bullet and the top is simply crimped to hold the wadding.
All it would have taken was a proper inspection to verify that it was unloaded/loaded with dummy rounds. Or, alternatively, Baldwin not pointing it at people.
Which leads me to the final thing you should always do: check the damn weapon. Don’t trust armorers. They’re people, too. They make mistakes, they fuck up.
Can I ask what the point of this screed was? I'm aware blanks are dangerous. That's irrelevant. There was a real bullet in the chamber. At some point, even if it was a blank, it would have been pointed at someone and the trigger pulled.
The point appears to be "check the damn weapon", which of course you could have said without 'educating' me, and wouldn't have been undercut with going on endlessly about wadding.
That point is a terrible one because the armourer is the expert, and is the one who should be signing the gun off as safe every time it is opened, not an actor who neither is required to have qualifications nor skills in clearing a gun as safe. If an actor interferes with the weapon, the armourer has to check it again.
It’s stupidly easy to check a firearm. You don’t have to be an expert to do it. For most fire arms it takes 5-10 seconds.
A large part of the “experts” job is to know what is and is not safe protocol, and to enforce it. Part of that includes teaching everyone who’s handling a weapon how to…. Handle a weapon safely.
no question, the armorer fucked up. She’s human. Humans make mistakes. Which is why you check the damn weapon, too. An expert doesn’t mean they don’t make mistakes. An expert means they’ve made enough they should know better. (Or have learned from an older expert.)
Frist off, it is also the actors' job to ensure the gun is safe. He should have been there when the gun was checked and verified it for himself especially when he purposely hired a fuck around and find out armourer.
Secondly, how were they supposed to know your level of knowledge about firearms and ammunition? With them explaining stuff in a simple and quick manner, we are all now operating on the same level of basic knowledge about this, so there should not be any miscommunications going on.