Counter point: one of my friends is a retired PJ. He was a professional soldier who was involved in armed conflict for years. He knows his way around weapons and absolutely does not fuck around.

We go hunting together, and he owns a lot of very nice guns. Even if he hands me a gun and tells me it’s clear, I still check it. I check it because it’s my responsibility to make sure I know what I’m doing when I’m holding the power of life and death in my hands. I check it if we’re just hanging out at his house, or if we’re zeroing in rifles. I’ve never found one of his guns to be loaded when he didn’t intend it to be, but I have found live rounds in other people’s “safe” guns.

Even if an “expert” on firearms tells you a gun is safe, it’s still a gun that’s in your hands. If it goes off, it’s on you if it kills someone. If you can’t be bothered to take the 30 minutes needed to learn how to check any firearm made in past 200 years, then you have no business touching any gun anywhere. That goes double if your job involves handling firearms in any capacity. If you regularly come into contact with guns, wether you’re a soldier, or cop, or an actor who does action movies, it’s your responsibility to know how guns work and when they’re safe and when they’re not.

Everyone keeps bringing up Brandon Lee when this shooting comes up. But these are grossly different situations. With Brandon, the gun was loaded with blanks, and the blank pushed a bullet that was stuck in the barrel of the gun out. Even if the actor had done a basic check to ensure the gun was only loaded with blanks, it’s entirely reasonable that he did not look down the barrel to make sure it wasn’t blocked. That I would agree falls on the armorer, they were using blanks on set, the Armorer should have made sure the gun was safe to operate with them. With Hutchins on the set of Rust, it would have been obvious that those were real bullets if he had looked at them. Prop bullets for revolvers or other shots where you see whole rounds are supposed to have the back of the bullet drilled out and/or a rattle installed in the shell so they can be identified as inert. A 5 second check would have identified the bullets were real and something was wrong.

He was handed a gun, didn’t check it, and shot a woman.

To put it another way: I use fall arrest harnesses for my job pretty frequently. My employer has a safety guy who maintains our equipment and is ultimately responsible for it. Do some of my coworkers take his word for it when he okays our harnesses, yes. Do I? fuck no. I always inspect my harness and report if something looks frayed or worn down. It’s my ass that works near the edge of a 100 foot drop, not Mr safety. Just because it’s someone’s job to do something doesn’t mean they’ll do it 100% perfect all the time, and when something involves a decent chance of death or terrible injury, it needs to be a 100% on job performance. So don’t rely on one person to be on the ball all the time. If something is deadly, it’s worth looking at twice or even three times to make sure it’s really safe.

i can see why you feel that way, I do too but that's not how it works. they're trying to charge the person who shot a person to death. Alec is a part of that plain and simple. he shot the gun.

The person who handed him the gun entire job was to make sure it was safe to use that gun as prop on a movie, to simulate danger, but in an utterly safe manner.

he was handed the gun by an assistant producer. the armorer- Gutierrez-Reed- handed Hall the firearm, who turned around and handed it to baldwin.

So no. that's not true at all.