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‘I Didn’t Pull the Trigger’
Really? That seems unlikely. I mean, that’s how guns work: it’s amazing how unlikely they are to fire if someone’s finger isn’t on the trigger. So, while it’s possible that Mr. Baldwin didn’t pull the trigger, there is about a zero percent probability that he didn’t pull the trigger.
Of course, he didn’t pull the trigger.
(Interesting note: There is such a thing as a possible event that has a zero probability of occurring. Math is an endless buffet.)
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, DA John Chisolm didn’t pull the trigger when his soft-on-crime bail policies let serial felon Darrell Edward Brooks Jr. out on $1,000 bail less than a month ago when he assaulted and then drove his vehicle into his girlfriend. His mobility restored, Mr. Brooks then committed mass murder and put another few dozen folks into the hospital when he plowed into a Christmas parade last week in Waukesha. (The SUV, of course, receives top billing, since Mr. Brooks is, by virtue of his hue, not useful as an example of America’s purported White Supremacist problem. For what it’s worth, the SUV wasn’t white either.)
Meanwhile, in the City of Brotherly Love and record-breaking homicide, DA Larry Krasner didn’t pull the trigger when he knocked the bail down from $200,000 to zero and then dropped all charges against (alleged) violent serial criminal Latif Williams. Mr. Williams wasted no time in making good on his inexplicable freedom by (allegedly) murdering Tulane Temple University student Samuel Collington three days ago, while attempting to steal the young man’s SUV and shooting him twice because Mr. Collington was reluctant to surrender the vehicle (which belonged to his mother).
Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse, neither Mr. Brooks nor Mr. Williams is a nerdy little white kid carrying a scary gun. They’re just a couple of guys who can’t stay out of trouble, but who manage to stay out of jail thanks to the generosity of prominent Democratic DAs who are more concerned about being woke than doing their jobs.
2022 is coming.
Published in General
Yes, they’re pretty common, but a special challenge on striker-fired guns because there’s no way (on any gun of which I’m aware) to re-cock a single-action striker-fired gun without racking the slide, since there’s no visible hammer.
Glocks are special, because they do an almost-full striker cock when you work the slide, but the integral firing pin safety prevents the firing pin from being released unless your finger is actually on the trigger. So even a sear failure (and I don’t think they call it a sear in a Glock) wouldn’t cause a misfire, because the firing pin safety doesn’t disengage until the trigger is pulled.
(That little lever on the front of a Glock trigger is not the firing pin safety. It’s a simple mechanical stop to prevent the trigger from moving back unless the lever is depressed along with it. The firing pin safety is activated by the same moving metal component — attached to the trigger itself — that servers as a sear.)
I don’t care for Glocks, because I think they’re clunky and unattractive and I don’t like the trigger feel, but I think they’re actually pretty terrific guns in terms of cost, quality, reliability, and safety.
Fair enough. But Colt designed the Single Action Army revolver in 1872. If the Italian replica was just a copy of the original, it would be missing about 150 years of firearms safety refinements that we find in modern revolvers. Which is just to say that the way a modern revolver operates may well not be the way that that Italian replica operated.
I don’t know that I don’t have any striker fired pistols. But I prefer pistols with visible hammers. Maybe it’s just a prejudice.
Me too. And safeties and de-cockers. But it really comes down to personal preference.
Hmmmm. The Italians don’t make an EXACT copy of historical revolvers. The insides the replicas are very different from the origonal as the maker is still subject to getting sued in an incedent if the fault is in the firearm.
Do you mean to say that the Italian reproduction has a different internal mechanism?
I think it’s what you’re used to. Me, I just can’t abide carrying a cocked gun with no mechanical safety. I don’t consider a trigger safety a safety. I consider a safety to make the gun non-operational — even if the trigger is pulled. As is on the S&W 59. Or any modern M-16/M-4.
I think you’d have to examine that specific gun to know that for sure. Which I expect the police, prosecutors and civil attorneys will eventually do. Or have experts do.
So then, how are they different?
To use a pistol double action, the trigger pull is so hard that accidents are unlikely. I keep the pistols I’m interested in with one in the chamber and the hammer down.
I have three or four Italian made replicas. The revolvers are all SAO. I also have a couple of weird rifles which I think are Italian-made, a 32-40 and a .45 Schofield; both lever actions. I didn’t buy any of them; I inherited them from my father.
Lol. For some reason, I thought the .45 Schofield was a 45-70. Thank God I couldn’t get the round in.
https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/nra-gun-of-the-week-uberti-usa-1873-single-action-cattleman-new-model/
This NRA article is interesting. Seems to suggest that some Italian Single Action Army replicas have modern safety features of the kind we’re discussing, and some don’t.
What are the actual safety features we’ve discussed? Have we mentioned a hammer block, or a pin block? Some have suggested a problem with the sear while attempting to cock the gun.
To get this gun to actually fire with the hammer down and the trigger untouched requires specific kinds of forces to get the hammer or the firing pin to strike the cartridge primer? I would think that dropping the gun on the hammer might do it, or perhaps dropping the gun in such a way that the firing pin has the momentum to move forward in its channel to strike the primer. But none of these happen by simply lifting the gun from a holster and raising it to the horizontal.
I think dropping it could do that, yes. But the hammer is also spring-loaded. So it wants to return with force and strike the firing pin as soon as it’s released. I guess the question is whether there’s something on that particular gun that stops that from happening when the trigger hasn’t been pulled. And that could depend on there are safety features and if so, whether they’re working properly.
The article mentions transfer bar and floating firing pin.
It doesn’t require safety features to stop a hammer from moving forward when cocked. It only takes the mechanism being functional, to do as it was designed; that is, not deliberately altered, or worn out or damaged. I don’t choose to read of gun mishaps and such, but I’ve never heard of a hammer falling and setting off a round without the hammer first being pulled back and the trigger being pulled. But however it went off, whether the gun was cocked of not, the gun didn’t discharge from a knock.
Maybe Baldwin is saying that the gun was handed to him cocked. And he pointed it and it chose at that moment to go off. Well, if it was given to him cocked, why didn’t he uncock it before putting it in his holster (or belt or whatever)? Doesn’t that seem dangerous to you?
If you’re saying that the gun went off while Baldwin was cocking it, that is, he was pointing a gun that he thought was unloaded at her while he was pulling the hammer back, and if his thumb slipped and the hammer fell, I don’t know, this may be possible on this gun. But then her death would have been the result of just as much carelessness as if he had deliberately pulled the trigger on a gun he thought was unloaded.
He’s still a reckless idiot.
Stipulated.
Also huge conflict of interest. Movie sets are populated with people who on average follow fewer laws than the general population.
Yep. Saw a snippet of his friendly interview with George Stephanopolous. He’s adamant about not pulling the trigger. But he freely admits pulling back the hammer and then letting it go. Apparently he is unaware that pulling the trigger causes the hammer to be released? He told Stephanopolous that they were setting up a shot where he was pointing the gun at the camera and cocking it, pulling back the hammer with his thumb. He says he pulled back the hammer and asked the cinematographer “Can you see that?” They tried several times until she was satisfied with how the shot would be composed. Once they were done, Baldwin said “I let go of the hammer. Bang! The gun goes off.” So he still had the weapon pointed at the camera (and cinematographer) when he dropped the hammer. Someone in an earlier post referenced the old saying “Going off half cocked“. Yep. Those old sayings come from real life. And that’s what seems to have happened here. That and the weapon being loaded such that the hammer was on a loaded chamber.
While my guess is that your initial suspicion is correct (if different, then different mechanism), there could also be a difference in matierials, shapes, tolerances for reliability purposes but which do not produce a different mechanism. Just the same mechaism performing better.
But I’m just spit-balling.
Long loud woman in a brass dress.
This “hold the hammer back” nonsense smells like the result of deciding to testify that you didn’t pull the trigger. As if speaking witha lawyer and deciding that pulling a trigger moves you closer to intent, and adjusting the facts to fit. That’s what I think.
But even taking his ridiculous story at face value, without the discipline to keep your finger AWAY from the trigger, if you’re holding the hammer back with your thumb (ahem), then you are likely to recruit your trigger finger into your grip without meaning to. His would likely have had the trigger back long before he let the hammer down.
But I don’t believe a word of it anyway. It’s enormously likely that the only mechanical failure here was in Baldwin’s decision-making apparatus, when he decided to pull the trigger on a weapon aimed at a co-worker. Wasn’t even in the script.
He’s making my crack about the “I didn’t know the gun was loaded” song being his new theme song even more appropriate, isn’t he?
DoubleDare (View Comment):
…Hmmmm. The Italians don’t make an EXACT copy of historical revolvers. The insides the replicas are very different from the original as the maker is still subject to getting sued in an incident if the fault is in the firearm.
-Some replicas are exact copies of the original 1873 SAA
-Some replicas are not and have modern safety features
…To get this gun to actually fire with the hammer down and the trigger untouched requires specific kinds of forces to get the hammer or the firing pin to strike the cartridge primer? I would think that dropping the gun on the hammer might do it, or perhaps dropping the gun in such a way that the firing pin has the momentum to move forward in its channel to strike the primer. But none of these happen by simply lifting the gun from a holster and raising it to the horizontal.
The article mentions transfer bar and floating firing pin.
Original Colt SAA’s use a series of notches in the hammer as sear engagements to keep the hammer back when cocked. If these notches are worn or have been filed (to “lighten” the trigger) the gun can accidently discharge by cocking the hammer without pulling the trigger. That’s where the “Hammer down on an empty cylinder” rule came from.
A transfer bar physically blocks the hammer from striking the firing pin unless the trigger is pulled. I suppose a transfer bar mechanism could be disabled if it were extremely dirty or damaged but I think it would be highly unlikely.
@henryracette Temple University not Tulane. Tulane is in New Orleans. Temple is known – favorably – for its excellent basketball team. Less so for the U.S. News and World Report college ranking scandal and memory-holed most famous alum, Bill Cosby.
During my time there in the 80s I commuted from the suburbs on the train. The surrounding area in North Philly was always a war zone. I never stayed on campus after dark and rarely walked from the North Broad Street SEPTA station to campus. I either hopped on the subway for a couple of stops or changed trains to get off on campus. I sometimes headed back home by going in the opposite direction and catching my train from the less ghetto-y Center City stations.
Philadelphia is yet another poster child of the failed blue state model and the Great Society. Sigh.
There are a lot of the theories floating around about the Baldwin shooting incident. Instead of Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment, let’s call it Schrödinger’s pistol. You can place the pistol into a box, come back and check on it, and it’s still in the box. It hasn’t moved, and it hasn’t discharged a round. It can’t do those things until someone places the pistol in their hand.
I had to qualify quarterly as a police officer. When you arrived at the range the range instructor inspected your Glock. Glock offers the armorer course at no charge to police officer’s. The range instructor(s) do a thorough safety check of each shooter’s pistol before they shoot, to include the correct amount of pressure for trigger pull.
Safety protocol on the range is controlled from start to finish. Off the range if an officer had an accidental discharge, whether on duty, or off duty it had to be immediately reported to a supervisor.
I’m sure someone’s said it above, but I was always taught that you don’t point a gun at someone you don’t want to kill.
True of course – first principles. But one exception would be pointing it at the camera when you’re filming a movie if you need to do that for the scene. And presumably there are people behind the camera.
To me though, that just shows why movie crews should be super-extra-religiously scrupulous about every other safety rule and protocol.
He says he is not responsible for killing his cinematographer. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! He was the last person to handle the pistol. Anyone who handled this firearm is responsible for this woman’s death. Reports of safety concerns, target shooting after filming closed for the day, live ammo mixed with blanks—they all pale against the fact the pistol was in his hand when it fired. Mike Gallagher on his morning show today said we should have some sympathy and compassion for this ‘actor’. Where was his sympathy and compassion for the family, friends, and coworkers of the woman he KILLED when he did that interview? I’ve seen precious little civility from this ‘actor’ over the last several years for the rest of us ‘deplorables’. Have you?
I say—turn the heat up on him—ALL THE WAY UP!!!