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Tragedy on the Movie Set Rust
I work at an electric utility. My job is IT-related, providing support to our power plant workers and field personnel (linemen and other electrical workers). As a part of that job, I attend safety meetings. Safety is big at our electric utility and again and again is called the first priority for employees, with providing electricity to our consumers as a second priority.
My job is not as hazardous as the electrical workers I support, but my job does take me inside power plants and substations, and my training includes safety protocols to follow while in those facilities. In addition, the technology I am responsible for assists in making those facilities a safer place.
With regards to the recent accidental shooting on the set of the movie Rust, I have some observations working for an employer with a safety culture given the facts (still subject to change at this early date).
Fact one: Before this tragedy, there had been a previous incident involving an accidental live ammunition discharge on set.
Was there a safety stand down? If something equivalent had happened in one of my employer’s power plants, there would have at least been an investigation and preliminary findings would have been shared with all personnel, even office employees not working at the plant. My employer is committed to transparency. While accountability is part of our safety program, actual names would not be shared, just the incident and the findings.
Another tenet of our safety program is that safety is everyone’s responsibility. Our field personnel, usually linemen, are allowed, but not required, to carry firearms in the field, because, bears. But before granted that permission, they are required to attend a firearms safety course, even though the average Alaskan has considerable knowledge about firearms, even the ones that don’t own one.
Was there a firearms safety course that all personnel, especially the actors, had to attend? Were they instructed on how to check any firearm handed to them on whether it was loaded or not? Were firearms handed to them with the safety on? Was there a safety on that firearm? Did all personnel handling firearms on the set, including the actors know how to tell the difference between a blank and actual live ammunition?
Was there a safety briefing before the scene was to be shot? Going back to my electric utility employer, all field personnel are required to have a safety briefing before entering a substation. All plant personnel are required to have such a briefing before starting a task on the floor of the plant.
Those are just some of the questions I expect the investigation of this incident to address.
Published in General
Where was OSHA? If we had a similarly dangerous occurrence (the accidental discharge of a firearm), the job would have been shut down for a couple of days while OSHA investigated.
I suspect that Hollywood and Hollywood people believe that OSHA is only for the peons, not for Hollywood.
OSHA is busy addressing the most important crisis extant in the world today – vaccination mandates. They can not be expected to concern themselves with mundane things like employee safety.
Why is there even live ammunition anywhere on set? Are they so far in the boonies they have to hunt for food? Or security guards to fend off the crazed New Mexicans?
My question exactly.
Sorry. I forgot.
Aviation has a good metaphor for situations like this: “The holes in the Swiss cheese lined up”. Meaning, it took more than one layer of screwup. One person makes a rare mistake, the next one makes a different unlikely mistake, and then the third one, who’s supposed to monitor and catch problems, fails too. That’s how Three Mile Island happened, as well as the Challenger shuttle disaster, as well as the AF 477 crash.
New officers in the academy start on the range by loading the rounds they need. For example two rounds center mass you load two rounds, fire them and you’re empty, then the next step is load three rounds center mass, and so on.
Experienced officers shoot fully loaded. For example with the Glock 17 you have 18 rounds in the Glock, and then two magazines on your belt, each magazine contains 17 rounds. You have to count your rounds as you shoot, and replace magazines when needed. This is called a hot range. Nobody moves forward, or backward off the firing line until everyone on the line is holstered.
You don’t remove your Glock from the holster unless you are on the line, and shooting. If you’re waiting to shoot, or walk back to your vehicle that pistol remains holstered. If you didn’t empty a magazine you must drop the magazine and unload, or reload on the line.
We were required to report an accidental discharge when we were on duty, or off duty no matter the time of day or night. Failure to report that discharge meant termination, and an officer I did not know did not report an off duty discharge, suffered a wound to the hand and was terminated.
It’s fun to condemn ‘idiots’, but until this investigation is concluded, I’m not prepared to even contemplate blame.
Why was Baldwin pointing a gun and firing it at someone?
Because they were making a movie about people shooting people?
Perhaps half-crazed Californians who had just arrived fro San Francisco.
I’ve read that some of the people on set were doing some target practice earlier with the same gun.
I read one report that said that. The info will flow.
What do you/anyone think the chances are that this movie will eventually come out? After all, The Crow did.
They’re probably also focused on transgender issues, because who isn’t these days?
These are all excellent questions and comments. I’ve been wondering these things as well…Why did they have live ammo? Who in world loaded the “prop” gun with live ammo? Why did Baldwin aim at a non-actor and pull the trigger? Who was in charge of making sure the gun was loaded with non-live ammo?
There are a million whys here….
As to why AB was pointing at a non actor, my understanding is that they were trying to get a birds’ eye view of the gun. Which makes no sense to me. There has to be thousands of those shots that could be McGuivered. Same with the sound effects. How many thousands, and thousands of tape is there of a bullet firing?
A million whys, indeed.
Well, there are some people even here who criticize a specific model of gun’s operation, etc, and if they used a sound effect that wasn’t of the right gun, and the right ammo/load, in the right atmospheric conditions, at the right distance, in exactly the right sync to when the gun is supposedly fired… they’d criticize the movie for that.
I see stuff like that regularly even for relatively innocuous stuff on youtube such as “Lost WW II fighter found in the ocean” etc. If such-and-such-a-plane had a 3-blade prop and the video shows an “example” 4-blade or even the WRONG 3-blade, they get jumped on as “Fake.”
Yes, a lot of questions. If Baldwin was firing a blank to film the gun going off, why didn’t he think it wasn’t a “hot” gun? Because he thinks guns loaded with blanks are “cold”? Then what is an empty gun? Iced? Are blanks the same thing as empty?
And on the other hand, if blanks make a gun “hot”, why did he say that he’d never been handed a hot gun before? Are guns loaded with live rounds volcanic? Where did the term “hot” come from if guns loaded with live ammo don’t exist in film work?
It seems like there are three safety conditions — empty, blanks and live — and only two words to describe them.
And of course there’s the possibility that the gun was SUPPOSED TO BE “cold,” but it wasn’t.
Right. But did “cold” mean only blanks? This occurred as apparently during filming a shot. Why would they even have blanks if they weren’t gong to use them, when the whole point of this shot is to film the firing of the gun?
Eh, we won’t know for a while, if ever.
I can think of other options too. It might have been that Baldwin was going to film the scene holding the gun and looking like he fired it, but some kind of stunt double was going to be filmed from a different angle actually firing the gun, even just with a blank. He was given the stunt double’s gun by mistake.
Yes, there are a lot of hypotheticals.
https://nypost.com/2021/10/23/baldwin-ignored-no-1-rule-of-gun-safety-hollywood-weapons-expert/
Sorry, not very knowledgeable on this incident. How many shots were fired? Weren’t 2 people shot?
What would one expect when getting information through the news media?
It’s another reason why I don’t think it’s very important to keep up with the news.
He was practicing for the photo shoot, pardon the pun. Just saw this on Yahoo News:
And further down:
And still further down.
There seems to have been a lot of improper gun safety there. And stupidity.
No kidding.
Somebody hands me a gun, I check the chamber. I don’t care if they checked it or not. I don’t care if I trust the person or not. You always presume that every gun is loaded. Every time.
I just don’t understand…