In your experience, have you ever seen the responsibility of set prop safety fall on the producer and not be delegated to someone else? Based on what you write here, I assume not which would confirm my initial belief.

This is 100% on the armorer

… Except for one other guy taking a gun he knew nothing about, pointing it at a person and pulling the trigger.

No, I think they are both guilty. Obviously not equally.

If the common judicial practice is different - then maybe some day there’ll be a new precedent.

He was far from the only producer. Quite frankly I doubt very much he did any real work besides acting.

The liability belongs to the company as a whole, absent some slam dunk of a memo where Baldwin personally said “Hire this lady, she’s my cousin’s kid, also I personally know she falsified her credentials but fuck it.”

That’s rule number one on the shooting range, It’s not quite the same in film or on stage.

In those cases, actors have to trust their prop master or armorer.

Those are the people specifically hired to make sure the gun or the bullets are fake.

Baldwin was handed a gun, and specifically told that it was cold. The person handing it over even called out for the entire set that it was a cold weapon. The director then immediately called places. Because that’s how it works.

But the gun was not cold.

Now, the person whose job it was to maintain those weapons was incompetent. Baldwin didn’t hire her, he didn’t hire anyone. He was one of 10 producers and mostly handled fundraising and script changes.

But he made fun of Trump a few times, and was involved in a gun death in a Trump friendly area. In California the armorer would be facing these charges, and would have faced them as soon as the initial investigation was over, not several years later.

Can’t really expect that any more than you expect that Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone personally made sure the paint buckets he swung at Joe Pesci were actually empty. It’s just not how it works.

It’s up to the props people, in this case the armorer.

I honestly would not expect a bunch of Californian actors to know that. You’re often not dealing with a crowd of people who grew up hunting or at the range. You’re dealing with people who hire an armorer to bring that expertise to the set.

The rules of firearm safety apply when your buddy is showing off his new canik, not when you’re a professional on a movie set. A million other actors have ignored those rules on a million other sets, and it’s typically perfectly safe because the armorers know what they’re doing, and the crew isn’t bringing live rounds on set.

I mean… by this metric Michael Massee should have done time for shooting Brandon Lee during the filming of The Crow.

Yeah, the director and editors are gonna love you making sure your props are cleared every single shoot.

I find that to be a pretty big leap. When she took the role of armorer she assumed all responsibility on set to ensure the safety of the crew, which was the entire point in Baldwin hiring someone to that position in the first place. Her gross negligence if not outright fraud is a result of her own actions and nobody else.

At most I’d give 20% responsibility to Baldwin for not examining her background more closely.

Baldwin was one of 10 producers and was not the hiring director. He, in fact, hire her.

I’ve heard that there were live fire practices on set, but could never back that up.

What I did find the last time this came up was a write-up about how there were reloads intermixed with the dummy rounds, re-loads that had been used on a completely different film shoot, where the actors of that film were walked tough some target practice with live rounds, so that they would better understand how a gun firing live rounds would kick.

Then a coffee can full of mixed live and dummy rounds ended up kicking around for a couple of years before being sent out to the Rust filming location, and the armorer didn’t know how to check the bullets. Or didn’t know that she had to. She was told that everything sent was a dummy round.

There were a bunch of live rounds found mixed into props, including Baldwin’s ammo belt.

All of them looked like the standard dummy round.

real bullets. . .
playing . . .

That’s fucked up.
I find it very hard to understand the attitudes some people have towards firearms.

This is not accurate. At.all. it’s really funny how much stuff gets repeated online without any evidence. Social media is just one big game of telephone

I would love to see a source on that story, because it sounds super made up

Um no. That’s a blatant lie.

He was handed a gun, and told it was cold.

According to a search warrant, the guns were briefly checked by armorer Gutierrez-Reed, before assistant director Halls took the Pietta revolver from the prop cart and handed it to Baldwin.[38][39] In a subsequent affidavit, Halls said the safety protocol regarding this firearm was such that Halls would open the loading gate of the revolver and rotate the cylinder to expose the chambers so he could inspect them himself. According to the affidavit, Halls said he did not check all cylinder chambers, but he recalled seeing three rounds in the cylinder at the time. (After the shooting, Halls said in the affidavit, Gutierrez-Reed retrieved the weapon and opened it, and Halls said that he saw four rounds which were plainly blanks, and one which could have been the remaining shell of a discharged live round.)[40] In the warrant, it is further stated that Halls announced the term “cold gun”, meaning that it was empty.[38] Halls’s lawyer, Lisa Torraco, later sought to assert that he did not take the gun off the cart and hand it to Baldwin as reported, but when pressed by a reporter to be clear, she refused to repeat that assertion.[41]

People attacking him just make shit up left and right.