I often forget about the rabbit hole of current politics… I know so little about celebrities all I know is he was great on 30 rock 
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The actors job is to follow the director, follow the script, and make sure that his actions can be seen by the current camera position. If he messes up his costume, or changes his stance in the process of inspecting his gun, that will create continuity problems-- which will necessitate a retake.
The 1AD’s job is to make sure that he delivers a safe gun into the actor’s hands. Don’t let “Assistant” fool you-- it’s a specialist job akin to “stage manager”. And he had years and years of experience.
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Re: Thank You
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Some films do. And in John Wick there was a lot of very close shooting that would be too dangerous. Certainly with advances in CGI that look is more believable than in the past.
But the point is, Keanu went through live course of fire to know how one would move and react to firing a gun that fast and it translated into a very believable performance. Heck, the first John Wick showed me how to do a one handed press check.
Another option. I did see an interview (maybe it was posted on BB?) with two stunt people and they were commenting on various movie stunts, and when asked about prop guns, one preferred the blanks as you get the reaction of the bang more during the performance.
Not that I am against filmmakers using either methods. Do what ever works for your film. I did read an NPR article saying this was the first shooting fatality since The Crow. Given the millions of blanks rounds fired in movies since then, it is a very safe track record. It took egregious lapses in safety to result in a tragic death. 
I agree.
Yep. Though if you have a good crimp with no live primer, it would be very unlikely that it would lodge in the barrel. The size of the bullet requires real force for it to get into the barrel.
There should never be live primers in dummy rounds. If they are still doing that, they shouldn’t.
The dummies were for close ups were you can see in the cylinder. So they wouldn’t be used in Semi-autos, there is no point.
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Being held accountable is what I meant in the second use of the phrase there. Not a great choice of words on my part. I was going for a rhetorical structure there of reusing the phrase in a reinterpreted way, but I guess it didn’t work as well as I’d hoped.
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I know this might sound like wild fantasy but, bear with me, how about having far fewer movies with fucking guns in the first place?
They are not part of my life. Why the fuck are you hey a mainstay of films?
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That is actually the opinion of my dad. Their presence in media is typically over used and unrealistic.
But violence, conflict, and sex is what sells a lot of media, so… I dunno.
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I’m very fortunate to have had far more sex than violence in my life!
To be fair I’d say the vast majority of people have.
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Eh, close enough
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Just as this story couldn’t get any worse
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He has 83 credits on IMDB.
Probably a few more horror stories to be unearthed.
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I know you know this, but I do like reminding people who ask “Could it get worse?” that the question always has the same answer.
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My background: I’ve spent about half my working life on heavy industrial or high voltage sites. Good sites and bad. I’ve never seen anyone die on site, but I’ve seen some near misses. The vast vast vast majority of the time: when someone has been hurt or killed, the person immediately responsible had a boss or supervisor who knew things were bad and let it happen anyway. Usually because the supervisor’s boss didn’t have their back. And it typically goes up the chain just like that.
That’s why I’m pretty sure the armourer’s failure is the end result of a systemic failure.
I’ve never been on a site where a 24-year-old had the clout to push back against bad safety culture. That has to come from someone on the management side with the power to have people hired and fired, or someone on the labour side with the power to stop work. You have to be able to disrupt cash flow for someone else if you want to make things change.
That’s why all this media attention on the armourer strikes me as being off. Who let this happen? Why do I have to look twice as hard to find anything about that?
None of this diminishes the responsibility of the armourer. It expands the accountability to her chain of supervision.
It’s really a terrible situation all around.
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It is just mind boggilingly crazy to me that there exists an industry (whose purpose is entertainment) that takes all the responsibility to be safe away from the end user of a potentially dangerous item.
Working in a medical field my life is checklists and SOPs all designed to make things safe for everyone (staff and patients). We are taught, and teach, repeatedly that safety is everyone’s responsibility. Everything has backups (because mistakes will eventually happen you need redundancies to everything). I appreciate the armourer and AD are supposed to be checks. But how hard would it be to provide safety training to the end user? (basic training like recognizing a bullet/blank/dummy, empty chamber/clip and clear barrel). I refuse to believe it is impossible to create a good movie if the end user also checks that the dangerous item they are passed is set up correctly?
Just to be clear this is not some strange pro trump,anti Baldwin, or political commentary. I don’t believe he is even primarily responsible. I am just someone who sees a completely needless loss of life and a family forever damaged because safety was compromised at every possible level.
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The quotes cited above from this particular armorer make it sound like she was promoting bad gun safety culture rather than pushing back against it. But as you say, if she was unqualified or irresponsible then that’s still a sign of a greater systemic failure in an industry that put profits over safe working conditions.
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That isn’t as basic as it is in regular life. The point of a dummy bullet is often to visually match a real bullet. Testing may require destroying the dummy, preventing the scene from being filmed. If they are trying to match a previous shot they may need the clothing to be draped in a certain way and want to have placing the big metal weight at the end of the arm as the last step. To use a medical example, an anesthesiologist will know the color of the appropriate canisters, the right hoses, and other such things, but if the supply firm filled the canister with the wrong colorless gas, there are problems.
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Hopefully it doesn’t end up being like when Brandon Lee was killed and the subsequent investigation found so much negligence spread across so many different people that it ended up being literally impossible to prosecute anyone.
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Maybe? But if the prop bullets are built to look like real bullets, I’m not so sure that’d add much.
Taking a parallel I’m familiar with: high voltage safety systems are like firearms: mistakes can have subtle causes [1], and can happen in an instant with lethal consequences. The safety aspect is generally accepted to be the realm of professionals. I’m not a high voltage safety professional; I occasionally depend on them to keep me alive. There are a couple basic checks I do. But for a lot of it, my life is in their hands. And quite frankly, I’m safer for that compared to personal responsibility. There’s too much I don’t know.
It’s pretty common, when mistakes are easy and the stakes are high, to assume that most of the people are not able to do their own checks. In those cases, you have a few other layers of protection that involve experts and lay people and a lot of cooperation. Layers which initial reports suggest were flawed or missing here.
[1] or maybe not-so-subtle, in this case.
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Yeah. I was giving benefit of the doubt, applying a healthy distrust of media, etc. But I do suspect you’re right and I’m being too generous.
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