When You Assume

Court TV

 

The Lynch Baldwin Posse, much like, or because of, Jackass Branca, wants to assume a lot of facts not in evidence, in order to comfortably leap to their conclusions, and thence "Get a rope!"

The first one is, they want to assume that what Baldwin's gun should have looked like would be the photo in the header.

They then go on to assume that what he would have actually seen would be this:

And then thrown the "Hey, waitaminute, there's a BULLET in my gun!" flag, and all tragedy would've been averted.

Natzsofast, Guido.

The rehearsal in question was specifically one where Baldwin was to draw his pistol, point, cock, and fire it right at the camera.

For those four days or more behind the curve, the "Another take? How 'bout I shoot you instead?" story disappeared, as the pure fairytale it was, in about 2 seconds of the incident.

They weren't shooting "takes". They were rehearsing for them. Takes are when they're actually filming, for those gloriously ignorant of the entire moviemaking process (yet somehow consider themselves competent to opine on it). So nobody, not even Baldwin in Full @$$hole Mode, is going to say that, or do that, because it never happened like that.

He was doing his exact job, as instructed by the script, his boss the director, and his whole reason for being on set.

So, where were we?

Oh yeah: Capturing a gunshot from the shooter looking straight down the barrel, which was in the script, and why he was pointing at it (and the three people in closest proximity, by default).

So, on any movie in decades, what would that gun have looked like, from the camera angle?

THIS.

Because you, me, and 100 years of cinema audiences want ever-more precise cinema verite, we won't sit still for empty guns with CGI muzzle flash, guys "firing" with auto slides locked back, or rifles out of battery, and 57 other "it's bullshit" complaints armchair weapons aficionados spew like dog piss on a fire hydrant every time there's a new action movie.

So the cylinder is loaded with dummy rounds. Not empty.

Which would look like this, when Baldwin, the PropTart, or anyone else "checked" the weapon.

QED. So long, and thanks for all the fish. And fuck off with your ignorant ravings.

"Yahbut, Aesop, the dummy rounds, the blanks, and live rounds are all supposed to be conspicuously marked, so that Any Foole, even gun-amateur Baldwin, let alone PropTart, could spot them immediately!"

Uh huh. They certainly are supposed to be.

By whom, Sherlock?

Oh yeah, the same exact homicidal PropTart that violated all the OTHER Safety Bulletin rules and regs???

Who probably loaded the very live round(s) into the chambers along with the dummies?

So Baldwin wouldn't have seen anything untoward whatsoever, having "checked" the weapon before the rehearsal.

Which brings up another point:

Who says Baldwin never "checked"?

Granted, he's only supposed to witness loading if blanks are being loaded, and only then if he's the guy in front of the muzzle, and such witnessing is completely at the actor's option. And that opportunity depends on (stop me if you've heard this one) the same PropTart Armorer.

Whereas the actual loading of the gun, every time is supposed to be done by the armorer (in this case) and her designated assistant (usually another asst. armorer, but sometimes the prop master or another prop person). So who was that guy? The 2d AD, Dave Halls, whom we'll get to in a minute.

On this set, there was no double check by a person competent in weapons,  so weapons weren't double-checked correctly, and any such check was de facto slipshod, and the Armorer never conspicuously marked anything, just like she brought a live weapon to a set where it never should have been, and live ammo to a set where it never should have been. Starting to get a picture? Spot a trend?

And after mixing up dummy rounds and live ones, there's no way anyone could have "checked", and gotten any different result than dimbulb PropTart or 2nd AD Halls did.

Baldwin didn't "check"? Prove it. How do you know he didn't?

And more importantly, what difference would it make to the final result if he had, under the circumstances - yet again - wholly and completely the sole responsibility and creation of The Armorer on the movie, which she obviously failed in every respect to prevent?

Weapons amateur Baldwin, the very guy the Lynch Baldwin Mob wants to hold responsible for such an "obvious" failure of due diligence and circumspection, would have no more chance that Stevie Wonder to spot a problem, so whether he actually did the wholly superfluous third  "check" is entirely irrelevant to the incident.

But, alas, you can't argue anyone out of a position using facts, logic, and common sense, if he didn't use facts, logic, and common sense to get into that position in the first place. {cf.: Teaching pigs to sing.}

(The proof that this whole online pantytwist is nothing but kneejerk dogma is because even this will not dissuade the Baldwin Lynchers from their sacred mission. When nothing will disprove your pet cause, it's a religious belief, not a reasoned opinion, like Evolution, Global Warming, Second Hand Smoke, Bigfoot, Space Aliens, and every other illogical, unscientific, whackdoodle tinfoil batshit crazy theory every concocted by the minds of halfwits.)

Halfwits? Which brings us to the 2nd Assistant Director, one Mr. Dave Halls.

Who

*picked the weapon in question, from among three, off of the armorer's prop cart

* brought it to set and handed it to Baldwin

* loudly and clearly shouted "COLD WEAPON!", assuring everyone on the set - including Baldwin - that it contained no ammunition, either blank or real.

Of those three acts, see if you can guess how many were

* totally outside the scope of his normal job function as a 2nd assistant director, anywhere, since ever (their job is to assist on set with production, not props, and to wrangle talent to and from set)

* a specific violation of the Safety Bulletins it's his department's job to know and promulgate to the crew, on every production since ever in his lifetime and career working as an A.D.

*  a grieveable offense between the IATSE Property Union and the Producers Guild of America, had this been a union show, or even just a union armorer, which could lead to him being fined, suspended, and/or thrown out of the industry, for cause

* pure busybody dumbassery by an amateur weapons wannabe, which got someone killed.

TL;DR: All of the above.

So per affidavit testimony, two people, per the protocol, averred the weapon was not loaded with blanks (let alone live ammo), and neither of them noticed it was a real gun (or were too stupid to know this was something not permitted on a properly-run production), let alone noticed that there was a live round in the weapon.

But Baldwin, less weapons-savvy than either of them , would have made a difference and averting tragedy by "checking"... what, exactly?

Nextly, in their hop-skip-and-jump quest to assume Baldwin right into prison, all and sundry want to hold Baldwin to The Four Rules of firearm safety. How cute.

Sorry to break it to you, but

1) They don't apply here, or a host of other places, for multitudinous reasons.

2)They aren't the law, anywhere, AFAIK, and certainly not in NM criminal statutes. You could look it up, and I invite you to do so, and tell me where they are so codified. I'll wait.

So once again, the whole legal argument to the contrary based upon them can go suck it.

As we've hammered at again and again, Hollywood has The Seventy-nine Rules Of Firearms and Ammunition Safety, and which, besides being a wee bit more comprehensive than the Four Rules, have a much better safety record. They're also a lot more applicable to prop guns and blanks than are rules designed for live weapons designed to kill people, rather than for prop weapons, designed to not hurt anybody, with people standing at both ends of the hot range.

Any number of Brancasses in the lively internet discussion have tried to point out that, having  failed to "check" the weapon in the fatal shooting, Baldwin is therefore culpable for the resultant death, because he failed to exercise due regard and diligence in the matter of using an inherently dangerous device, and was therefore grossly negligent.

1) Due regard and diligence is a fine thing for actual guns firing actual bullets, which are  inherently dangerous. The movie industry doesn't use real guns on primary sets, ever, and so the items they use are not inherently dangerous. Brancasses trying to apply the wrong standard to the wrong implement fail the basic smell test. I'll shoot 100 prop guns at the jury itself from 30', and we'll see if there's any inherent danger. (Not really, that would be wildly prejudicial to the recockulous Imaginary Prosecution, so instead, we'll just shoot at cardboard cutouts of the jury, on a closed firing range.) Then we'll repeat the test with 100 real guns and real bullets, the exact kind not used in movies, and the exact one the Armorer never should have brought, and we'll see which one of the two is inherently dangerous.

2) Then I'll call Steven Spielberg to testify to the zero gun deaths in the Normandy Beach landing scene of Saving Private Ryan, which exact body count of no one was achieved using 500 prop guns shooting tens of thousands of blanks over several days of filming. Then we can get Ridley Scott to talk about all the people he didn't kill in Blackhawk Down under similar circumstances, then Chad Stahelski can talk about the zero dead from three John Wick movies (so far), and then Michael Mann can tell us about the three-day full-auto blastfest in downtown L.A. seen in Heat that killed another zero people, then we can get James Cameron to tell us about the inherent danger evidenced by the zero people he killed in The Terminator, Terminator II, Aliens, and True Lies, combined.

The one thing absolutely true about prop weapons is the almost utter lack of inherent danger. Provided you don't leave a slug in the barrel, or put them up against your own skull and pull the trigger, which are the only other two accidental gun deaths one even hears about in movie history.

The problem arose when a live weapon with a live round in it got introduced onto a film production set, when neither one of them were ever supposed to get there.

So, for the 500th time, who was it that fucked that up? "Paging Reed and Halls."

And lastly, the entire concept that Baldwin failed to exercise any diligence is recockulous prima facie, as any prosecutor would have beaten into his cheeks like Jack Nicholson slapping Faye Dunaway around in Chinatown:

Prosecution: "So, Mr. Baldwin, did you do anything, anything at all, to exercise due caution and circumspection to see that no one was harmed with the...instrument...in your hand before the fatal shooting???"

Baldwin: " Yes, I did."

Prosecution: "Oh, really? And what was that?"

Baldwin: "I made sure that the production had hired an armorer, rather than put the whole load for everything on just a propmaster, along with all the other duties of the propmaster's job. Someone whose entire, sole job, as Armorer, was to provide the entire production the correct weapons for the show herself, ensure that none of them could harm anyone accidentally, ensure their safe functioning, hand them out and take custody of them except when they were necessary on set for rehearsal and camera work, clean and maintain them every single day, and take scrupulous regard for loading them with the proper dummy rounds, or blanks, as required, while preventing any situation where there could ever be a real gun capable of chambering live ammunition on set, and furthermore that they themselves would never bring any live ammunition on set, nor let any be loaded accidentally, and to conspicuously mark dummy rounds, blank rounds, and live rounds uniquely so that any one of them and all of them could be quickly and absolutely correctly identified by the armorer, and their designated assistant, who was to double check every weapon with the armorer every time, before handing it to myself or any other actor. That seemed to me to be a pretty specific amount of due caution and circumspection to me, based on Hollywood's 28 year history of not killing people on set utilizing the exact same system. In fact, it seems to me to be extremely foolish to depend in any way upon weapons amateurs like myself or any other actor, rather than to specifically employ a subject-matter expert on firearms and ammunition, whose job was to comply with the 79 specific rules and regulations Hollywood insists are safe practice, since decades and decades ago. That's the due caution and circumspection I employed, in this case, sir."

Prosecution: "Um...er...no further questions...witness is excused."

Followed by the shortest deliberation of verdict in history, about 15 seconds, before the jury finds, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the foreman of the jury wants to change his first name to Red, and tell the judge what he thinks about the Prosecution:

I want accountability for weapons screw-ups just as much as anybody, and maybe more so, because unlike 99% of the country, I've worked on movie sets, as well as being a "gun guy", on top of which I'm the one trying to save the lives of people who get plugged by jerks with guns, and have been doing so since before some of you were even born.

It's also why I want to make sure you go after the right dumbass, instead of kneejerk lynching the guy you don't like the most, just because of that.

Baldwin's an anti-gun fucktard (although I'll wager that tapers off a bit now, in volume if not in basic intelligence), and all that karma shitting right in his mouth now is epically deserved. Pile on with all of that you'd like. The memes and videos I've seen have been hilarious. But his criminal prosecution for any sort of negligence is simply jackassical overreach, springing from undisguised hatred, and not any rational approach to the facts at hand.

And I'll bet 90% of the people in this entire discussion haven't seen The Oxbow Incident once, and think 12 Angry Men is about last years' NBA championship losers.

Take a breath, and cool your jets.

What did happen, what should happen, and what will happen, are all up in the air. And there's no guarantee whatsoever the last two will be identical.

Besides, maybe a miracle will happen, and maybe you'll be able to have your way yet.

But I can't lose, because heads, I'm right, and tails, Baldwin goes to prison.

(And let's be serious: more than a few of you don't give a shit either way: If I told you the tide came in twice a day, you'd run down to the ocean to check it yourself, just because I said it, and that pisses you off. You don't have a dog in this fight, you've just got your panties in a twist because you're not happy until everyone else isn't either.

Get a new schtick. We're over and done with you. And we're tired of being Hoot Gibson explaining proper weapons safety to Captain Steele in the Mogadischu chow line.)

Comments? New evidence, and logic, with no more "Yahbut..." mulligans given, or fuggedaboudit.

The Society For The Protection Of Deceased Equine Critters rules are in full effect. 

BONUS:

Comedy Truth from Phil

And McThag piles on too!