Hey, it's your nickel. Let the games begin:
1) Actors are literally excluded, expressly, from anything to do with the weapons handling and checking process, except watching actual experts do it. You could look it up. Page 4, point #12. My only superpower throughout this, contrary to an infinite number of so-called industry "experts", talking out their ass, is that I can read the rulebook, and they haven't.
2) I didn't call you, nor anyone else online, "Jasper and BillyBob". You are mistaken. Re-think your conclusions based on that misappraisal.
3) I didn't moderate away any of your comments. You are mistaken. Re-think your conclusions based on that misappraisal.
4) People doing their jobs is what they're paid for. No actor is paid nor expected to inspect weapons. For cause. They're not the experts, and more to the point, they're not the experts hired by and responsible to the production to do exactly that work. Re-think you conclusions based on that misappraisal.
5) People opining on how movie sets should be run, with no idea about the guiding bulletins for that, are bloviating idiots. Re-think your conclusions based on their grossly uninformed misappraisals of the situation.
6) An actor's job is to act, not check weapons. Re-think your conclusions based on the misappraisal of their job function and expertise.
7) A weapons handler is not a flunky, they're the subject-matter expert on weaponry on set. Re-think your conclusions based on that misappraisal of their job function and expertise.
8) The exact methodology for handling weapons on set designed by Hollywood has resulted in a flawless 28+-year streak of no accidental firearm deaths, from Brandon Lee's in 1993, until last Thursday, which encompasses tens of thousands of productions in movies and TV, and literally millions of blank and live rounds without a single death. The US commercial airlines haven't even done that well at safety. And what broke that streak was one utterly incompetent armorer on a low-budget p.o.s. show breaking, literally, every single rule and regulation of correct firearm and ammunition handling in the two most relevant Motion Picture Industry Safety Bulletins. Re-think your conclusions in light of the misappraisal of those facts.
9) Putting actors into the loop, where they haven't been and don't belong, is going to get people killed and injured with a predictable regularity. Re-think your conclusions based on the total misappraisal of that fact.
10) People in the motion picture industry who don't know what they're talking about, nor even possess basic familiarity with the fundamental safety guidelines adhered to in and by the industry, do not outweigh the reality of facts from people who do. Re-think your conclusions drawn from their misappraisal of those facts.
11) Putting untrained, unqualified, and incompetent actors into the loop as weapons inspectors, rather than relying on the system that excludes them to the greatest extent humanly possible, in favor of using actual weapons experts for the most critical functions right up until the moment of actual filming, in any form, is going to cost time, money, and lives. Re-think your conclusions based on a misappraisal of that fact.
12) Actors should no more check weapons used on set than should they run electrical cable for the lights, operate the camera and sound equipment, cook the meals, drive the trucks, nor perform any other function on set for which they are wholly unqualified, especially and doubly so when there are exactly trained experts for all those functions, ready to hand, at all times, at the express invitation of the people who run the show and pay the bills and salaries. Actors act. (If the audience is very, very lucky.) At anything else, they're amateurs, on a set full of professionals. Asking, let alone expecting, them to do something else is both unfair, and dangerous, for all parties concerned. Re-think your conclusion based on the total misappraisal of that reality.
I trust your expertise, in your lane. This topic is not that. Actors on set are not you at home or anywhere else. You at home are not an actor on a movie set. It's that simple.
There are rules in their world, as there are in yours, and they aren't the same for them as they are for you, nor can be.
If you walk into a bank with a ski mask and a machinegun, you're going to get 25 years.
If Heath Ledger does it, he gets an Oscar nomination.
This is not unique to Hollywood.
If I cut someone open and take out their body parts, I get sentenced to prison for mayhem for decades (after a lengthy psychological interview). If a doctor does that in a surgical OR, he gets a fat check, and the thanks of a grateful patient and family. Yet no one (in their right mind) runs around shrieking "No special rules for doctors!". If they did, at best, we'd laugh at them, and at worst, we'd throw rocks and fruit at them, or lock them up in a mental institution, and rightfully so. They'd be psychotic.
I'm really sorry for all the shrieking harpies upset that of the seven or more obvious, egregious, and criminally negligent reasons someone died on that set last week, not a single one attaches to any actions or failures on the part of anti-gun @$$hole Baldwin, and that instead almost every single one of them clings to the grossly incompetent actions of a nitwit less qualified to run weapons on a movie set that she is to be an astronaut or a brain surgeon. But facts are stubborn things, and the fact is Baldwin did nothing wrong.
If someone sells me a baked potato, but it's actually a bomb, just because I put it into the microwave and pushed the button doesn't make me a mad bomber, even when it goes off and kills people, and no matter how many people scream otherwise on the internet. Don't be one of them. Arguing to the contrary is the position people are in right now.
I warned people from the outset not to let their dislike for a thoroughly dislikable man color their judgement and opinions about what should happen, or who did what. In vain.
I say it again, with the further counsel not to be psychotic, and instead recognize that an actor performing or rehearsing on a movie set on a Western, is not you in front of a bank on your block.
Embrace that, instead of trying to force Reality to conform to the desires of your heart, in vain.
To put it in its most simple terms, Captain Ahab wasn't the hero of Moby Dick.
