dont prop guns have no bullets and just something that makes some sparks/smoke and a bang noise? how can it hurt someone?
Some do, but those are toys and not at all realistic. They're no use for a film. They might be used for a stage play, where realism is less important. They might be used when a "gun" is just required to be visible, just a piece of scenery.
But most prop guns (and all prop guns that are to be used in a scene) are real guns. "prop" just means it's owned (or rented) by the company making the film/TV program/play/game/whatever. It's their
property.
blanks do a
lot more than "makes some sparks/smoke and a bang noise". Blanks are actual rounds without a bullet on the end. They do everything a real round does except for throwing out a bullet. They explode. They generate a very large amount of hot gas under very high pressure. They'll also throw out some form of wadding which is needed to stop the load in the round falling out of the hole where there bullet should be. "a bang noise" doesn't cut it for a realistic gunshot noise. Unless you're firing low power subsonic rounds and using a suppressor, the sound of a bullet being fired is immense. It's a physical thing, harsh and brutal. "sparks" doesn't cut it either - if there should be muzzle flash, it will be fire, not sparks. An average handgun blank can be lethal up to about 2 metres. So while it's true that blanks "have no bullets", they are live rounds and absolutely capable of hurting someone. Fatally.
But that's not relevant in this case because the gun shouldn't have had blanks in it and didn't have blanks in it. The gun should have had dummies in it. Dummies
do have bullets, but they don't have a load or a primer so they're completely inert and thus no more dangerous than any hard object. A pencil would be a more dangerous weapon than a dummy round because it has a sharper end.
What happened in this case was that one (or possibly more) of the chambers in the revolver was loaded with a real round. There shouldn't have been a real round on set at all. A gun that was being used for filming should never have been loaded with a real round (that shouldn't have been on set anyway). The existence of the real round (that shouldn't have been loaded into the gun and shouldn't have been anywhere near the gun anyway) should have been detected when the gun was checked before it was handed to the actor. In most cases, the actor would have checked the gun too, although that's not usually absolutely required. It is absolutely required that the gun is checked, though. Every time. By a person on set specifically tasked with doing so. Usually the armourer, since their whole job is to handle arms and ensure that everyone knows exactly what is going on. But this production only had a part time armourer and it wasn't them who handed the gun to Baldwin. There's a whole slew of grevious failures of suitable safety precautions in this case.
