Alec Baldwin fatally shoots woman with prop gun on movie set

Soldato
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Surely, the person who loaded the gun would have noticed the live rounds?

Not if they were dummy rounds, whos purpose is to look like real rounds but otherwise lack the explodey bits.

The ones they'd use for close up scenes where an actor might be reloading, or pointing the gun towards the camera, such that you'd be able to spot that the chambers were empty. It would fit with the supposed scene that baldwin was practicing his draw, the stereotypical closeup of the fast draw threaten where the protagonist points his gun at the bad guy and makes some one-liner about making his day, but doesnt actually fire.

For example ive been binge watching ripper street recently and there are plenty of scenes where an actor checks if a revolver is loaded (a break action webley) where you see the back of the rounds or is pointing the gun toward camera and you can see "bullet" tips in the chambers.
 
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To be fair to Tefal, the initial reports back in late October said it was a Colt Dragoon revolver which is a black powder firearm, its only much later that the revolvers true identity was correctly reported.
 
Caporegime
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It’s also since been reported that the dummy rounds could be distinguished by looking at them in the drum… they simply didn’t check all of them.

All the excuses earlier about how this would have been some laborious process are complete bunk. The firearms woman, the AD and Baldwin all could and should have checked.

I don’t believe for a moment Baldwin’s excuse that the gun just went off either. Interesting that he’s since been disparaging about crew members who have spoken out too.
 
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I suspect this case is nothing more than deflection, as imagine the armourer is likely the person who will get the harshest punishment out of the three of them.

It definitely seems an odd case to try and prosecute, going by the above picture it wouldn't take a professional to recognise there is a difference between live ammunition and blank rounds. So for someone who is supposed to be a professional in firearms, would be able to spot the difference from a mile away.

Something really stinks.

There were no blank rounds involved. The case against the ammunition supplier says nothing about blank rounds. The death was not caused by a blank round. Any mention of blank rounds is a red herring.

Surely, the person who loaded the gun would have noticed the live rounds?

That should happen. It is easy to mistake a real round (live) and a dummy (not live). Blank rounds are also live rounds, but they weren't involved so the distinction is between real rounds and dummies. Dummies look the same as real rounds - that's the whole point of them. What should happen is that a suitably experienced person, someone who can detect the difference between a real round and a dummy, should check each round individually when loading the gun and keep the loaded gun in their possession until they hand it to the actor for a scene and then take it back afterwards. In this case someone (who knows who?) loaded the gun from an unsecured store of ammunition and left it on an open table for who knows how long then someone else handed it to the actor. And maybe someone else loaded the gun with other ammunition too - it's been claimed that the prop guns were not secured and were sometimes loaded with real rounds and used for target shooting for sport outside of filming. It's not yet known (and might never be known) exactly what happened.

The only scenario in which the ammunition supplier is responsible is if they made dummies that were wholly indistinguishable from real rounds (which shouldn't happen) and supplied the set with a mixture of real rounds and those incorrectly made dummy rounds. Maybe that's what happened, but my money's on multiple firearm safety protocol violations on the set.
 
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Soldato
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Soldato
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He said he didn't pull the trigger, but I don't believe that. But the footage at the start isn't the actual shooting, the moving of the firearm is from him releasing his thumb from the hammer, there doesn't appear to be an actual recoil from it being fired.
 
Man of Honour
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Video is sickening, quite aside from the incident itself, people so wrapped up in their own daily BS to pay a proper amount of attention to basic procedure, health and safety and so on, let someone else care about that mentality even from those whose job it is supposed to be and the armourer was clearly well out of her depth.
 
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