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    Alec Baldwin shooting

    Awful news that Alec Baldwin fired a prop gun while on a movie set and the cinematographer was killed and the director wounded. I'm not sure how a prop gun is capable of wounding someone after the Brandon Lee killing. Bitterly ironic that this happens right after many people were made aware of the dangerous conditions that crew members sometimes have to work under.

    I have a feeling that there is more to the story of what's been reported, but that will probably never come out.

    #2
    It is depressing that Alec Baldwin shooting folk (accidentally) hits the news wire when so much, so so much, goes fucking nowhere.

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      #3
      Star of film shoots person on set, wounds another, in apparent tragic mistake involving prop gun', isn't this where Columbo normally shows up?

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        #4
        The two people shot must have been stood close together, I can't imagine he would've fired twice.

        The missus actually woke me up with the news like it was a massive story and in my blurred state I conflated it with 9/11, where one is an accident and two is on purpose.

        In my state, I had an initial feeling that Baldwin might have completely lost his shit.

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          #5
          He's been known to lose his shit in the past.

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            #6
            This guy gives a good explanation for what is known to have happened.

            https://www.tiktok.com/@propstohisto...&is_copy_url=0

            Apparently crew members walked off the set for the horrible conditions they were being made to work in. This (admittedly, unsigned and unverified) screenshot talks about that:

            https://twitter.com/paulscheer/status/1451606504491024384

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              #7
              The mind boggles as to why live bullets would be anywhere near the film set, let alone in the gun.

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                #8
                It is the United States

                Live bullets and real guns are never far away, rather like rats in NYC

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                  #9
                  https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1451634746061168646?s=21

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                    #10
                    I still have no idea how I spent months in Texas without seeing a gun besides in a police holster. I'd say I passed plenty of idiots in the supermarket and in bars that had all sorts of shit concealed.

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                      #11
                      "Open carry" hadn't been completely liberalised at that time (and Corpus Christi may have had local restrictions).

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                        #12
                        Originally posted by anton pulisov View Post
                        The mind boggles as to why live bullets would be anywhere near the film set, let alone in the gun.
                        If it is anything like the incident that killed Brandon Lee, there might not have been live ammunition. In Lee's case, there was a dummy round left in the barrel that when the blank was fired, was forced out and hit him.

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                          #13
                          Originally posted by Rogin the Armchair fan View Post
                          Star of film shoots person on set, wounds another, in apparent tragic mistake involving prop gun', isn't this where Columbo normally shows up?
                          A sad event, and actually there was a Magnum PI episode with basically that plot line

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                            #14
                            The LA Times piece clarifies that “live” does not mean “real,” as I understand it. It could be a blank, but a blank still explodes, so I guess it could still propel something fast if there were something there to propel, I guess.
                            Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 22-10-2021, 21:55.

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                              #15
                              Talking to a friend yesterday who's worked as a directory of photography on small films, you often have real guns that are converted to prop guns via a conversion process that can involve welding something into the barrel, if that process isn't done well or the gun isn't properly inspected/maintained, it could in theory become loose and bits fired out when shooting with blanks, similar to what happened with the wadding from the dummy round killing Brandon Lee.

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                                #16
                                A number of industry people agree.

                                This from the Washington Post.

                                A regular gun cartridge has a shell casing holding a propellant powder. When a normal gun is fired, the propellant is ignited and the bullet attached to the front of the shell is activated. In comparison, the blanks used in prop guns usually have a material such as paper, cotton or wax attached to the front of the shell instead of a metal projectile.

                                “They’re supposed to be built in a way to prevent them from even being able to accept real ammunition,” tweeted Stephen Gutowski, a gun-safety instructor and firearms reporter for TheReload.com.

                                Bill Davis, a Georgia-based weapons expert who has worked on hundreds of film and television productions, told The Washington Post that the safety protocols in place on nearly all sets do a great job protecting the actors and crew. Prop guns are usually safeguarded by someone who specializes in firearms in a production or the props department, he said.

                                “If you follow the rules, you’re going to have a nice, safe day,” Davis said.

                                These prop guns with blanks are used on Hollywood sets because of the authenticity they add to filming. Firing a blank with a prop gun will produce three things that computer-generated imagery sometimes struggles to match: a recoil, a loud bang and a muzzle flash, which is the light created when the propellant powder combusts. Dave Brown, a Canada-based professional firearms instructor who has worked on films and TV shows, wrote in American Cinematographer magazine that although visual effects and CGI can help with close-range gunshots that cannot be filmed safely, firing guns with blanks makes a scene look as real as possible.

                                “Blanks help contribute to the authenticity of a scene in ways that cannot be achieved in any other manner,” Brown wrote in 2019. “If the cinematographer is there to paint a story with light and framing, firearms experts are there to enhance a story with drama and excitement.”

                                Blanks can nonetheless still be dangerous: Even if there isn’t a bullet inside, anything near the end of the prop gun’s barrel can be a threat thanks to the muzzle flash and superheated gas expelled from it. As a result, significant, and even fatal, damage can be done when the trigger is pulled.

                                “They can kill you, but only if it’s a contact wound to the skull or a carotid artery, something that can kill you,” Davis said. “But they are not designed to kill.”

                                Directors such as Zobel have shifted to CGI instead; he noted that the gunfire featured in “Mare of Easttown,” the crime drama starring Kate Winslet, was all digital.

                                “You can probably tell, but who cares?” he said. “It’s an unnecessary risk.”

                                There is a history of prop-gun incidents resulting in deaths on movie sets. Jon-Erik Hexum died days after accidentally shooting himself in the head with a prop gun on the set of the CBS show “Cover Up” in 1984. Authorities said at the time that Hexum, 26, was pretending to play Russian roulette with a .44 Magnum revolver when the gun fired a blank cartridge that killed him.

                                In 1993, about nine years later, Brandon Lee, the 28-year-old actor and son of actor and martial artist Bruce Lee, died on the set of the film “The Crow” after actor Michael Massee shot him in the abdomen. The prop gun used, which was supposed to be loaded with blank and “dummy” rounds, was somehow loaded with a .44-caliber bullet, police said. The North Carolina district attorney later said the shooting was caused by the crew’s negligence.

                                Davis emphasizes that the prop guns used on set should be considered dangerous and only handled by a legitimate firearms expert. Noting that Baldwin was filming a Western movie, he said the weapons from that time period are some of the “most dangerous guns to use on a set” because they do not have gas restrictors in their barrels.

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                                  #17
                                  Originally posted by anton pulisov View Post
                                  I still have no idea how I spent months in Texas without seeing a gun besides in a police holster. I'd say I passed plenty of idiots in the supermarket and in bars that had all sorts of shit concealed.
                                  it is remarkably easy to achieve - I haven't seen a gun yet in Chicago and there have been plenty of shootings within a walking distance from where we live.

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                                    #18
                                    That quote from the Post article on Brandon Lee is wildly inaccurate, it was a combination of an improperly-prepared dummy round that left debris in the gun and a blank that subsequently propelled said debris, not a round of live ammunition, which is what it suggests -- while the dummy round was made out of a .44-caliber bullet (improperly), as stated it's misleading.

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                                      #19
                                      Originally posted by caja-dglh View Post

                                      it is remarkably easy to achieve - I haven't seen a gun yet in Chicago and there have been plenty of shootings within a walking distance from where we live.
                                      Well yeah there was a shooting in front of my flat in Sweden last year. It's just I always had this idea that every second person in Texas is walking around with a gun stuffed down their pants.

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                                        #20
                                        In 2019, it is estimated that at least 36% of Texans own guns and there are more than 29 million guns owned in Texas]

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                                          #21
                                          Wasn't Baldwin one of the producers of the film? So even assuming a total accident, he could be in a world of shit.

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                                            #22
                                            I know a fair few people who own guns. But almost none of them ever walk around with their guns. The people who wander around with guns are definitely still a minority (of the minority - as Ursus stat points out, even in Texas fewer than 50% own guns).

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                                              #23
                                              Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
                                              Wasn't Baldwin one of the producers of the film? So even assuming a total accident, he could be in a world of shit.
                                              I've been wondering about this - Baldwin tweeted about everyone being exhausted, implying that they were overworked. Yet he's also a producer on the film. My first thought is that either he is culpable of driving his staff too hard, or that his title as "producer" is basically honorific and the actual production work was being done by other people.

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                                                #24
                                                The latter is more likely, but may well not make a difference for his legal exposure

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                                                  #25
                                                  it is important to note that the law on "walking around with guns" here differs dramatically from state to state (and sometimes by locality within a state).

                                                  Texas is now essentially unrestricted, while NYC requires a special permit that is quite difficult to get if you aren't in law enforcement.

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