Even money says that ol’ Baldwin winds up an even bigger spokesman for disarming you and me, because of it.

Just think about this for a minute. In the absolute clown world we find ourselves living in right now, just what would the Hive Mind’s natural reaction be, to someone like Alec Baldwin shooting two people on a Hollywood movie set with a “prop” gun, killing one and wounding another with a single shot? Well, first of course it would be an absolute mêlée of CYA, including enough intentional confusion thrown out there so as to make sure all the, er, important people still have a chair after the music stops.

After that settles down, though…

Well, who better to lend personal gravitas, and now personal experience, to the idea that “hey, if it can happen to me…” than Alec Baldwin? What gloriously compelling and marketable evidence that the peasant rabble truly can’t ever be trusted with arms! After all, if the existing copious regulations and explicit safety requirements, on a professional Hollywood set, QED failed to protect the morally enlightened Alec Baldwin from making a fatal mistake, just imagine how much greater carnage might happen if the little people got their grubby, stupid, untrustworthy hands on such equipment! (shudder)

It’s all a natural fit for a celebrity campaign and cautionary tale, coming soon…

^{Shamelessly borrowed from the Internets.}

Yes, of course the idea is patently ridiculous. Which is why it would fit right in. (Again: clown world.)

For anyone reading this who might not already know the history, ol’ Alec Baldwin has for many years been entirely unsubtle about his disdain for the right of the common peasantry to keep and bear arms, and like many such victim-disarmament advocates, his lectures have always been substantially based on the condescending idea that you cannot be trusted not to hurt yourself and others, whereas the morally enlightened and those who protect them, get a complete pass any time it suits them, no matter what they may do. And so, regardless of any of the details of what actually did happen in this present case–claims still flying around as of this writing–Baldwin has well and truly earned whatever ridicule he may get from it.

Even taking into account all the expected CYA and intentional confusion over the details, it looks bad. As of this writing, it’s being reported that there were known prior safety concerns, both on this production and on other productions of those most directly involved. And regardless of who was supposed to do what and when, it seems pretty conclusive that a few things are known for sure, including:

• The gun was fired, whether intentionally or negligently. To the simpering idiots who try willfully to dodge this fact with absolving language like “the gun went off”, or “a prop gun discharged”, or “it was a misfire”, or even the descriptor “accidental”…no, NO, NO. The gun in question is a simple machine, a single action revolver, with a well-understood and reliable design which requires two deliberate strokes to discharge*, and that means that QED Alec Baldwin brought the gun to full cock and pressed the trigger. Stop acting like he didn’t fire the damn gun. He may well not have intended homicide, but intentions have nothing to do with mechanics.
• Multiple people, including but absolutely not limited to Alec Baldwin, flagrantly violated Rule One here. This case is a textbook vindication of how the cold range mentality can, has, and will get people killed. (Several reports, as of this writing, even have one or more people singing out the very words, “cold gun!”, as some sort of blanket absolution against even the simplest need to check again.) One could argue that Baldwin himself also violated all the other Rules as well, but a movie set does make some things…well, problematic, in this sense**. But regardless, if even a single person, along whatever actual chain of custody happened from the time the live round went into the gun up until the moment of discharge, had properly observed Rule One, this disaster would not have occurred.
• Absent any sort of actual foul play, multiple people absolutely did drop the ball on this, and should be prosecuted for criminal negligence resulting in death, if not involuntary manslaughter. The production itself should probably be ruined with civil lawsuit damages; this of course cannot bring back the woman killed, but it might send a useful message that “cutting corners” can have fatal consequences.

Personally, since I’m kinda in rant mode now, I also dislike the very term “prop gun”, as people are using it here. Whether used as a prop or not, clearly this was a “real gun”, and rightly or wrongly, the term “prop gun” carries at least a bit of a cold-range-mentality connotation that such is in some way a “safe gun”–and that is inherently a mental violation of Rule One.

Now of course there is a spectrum of usage here. Some reporters and commentators seem to be using the term deliberately and deceitfully, as part of a larger semantic absolution package to protect the politically-approved activist Baldwin himself; others I suspect are using “prop gun” more innocently. Either way, I think it is important not to let this “prop gun” thing go, since Rule One is inherently a problem of mind-set, not of status nor of procedure, and letting it pass seems like an invitation to guarantee another disaster down the road.

And the “prop gun” term is but one example of arguably nerdy details that I think really matter. As time goes on, I find myself understanding more and more the old-man’s lament that fewer and fewer people fully understand the details, even among the conspicuously gun-friendly. Consider this clip from the Timcast IRL podcast:

Now please understand, I am not picking on this clip because I somehow dislike it. Totally to the contrary; I think Tim Pool and his guests do a great job at getting right to the heart of the matter under discussion. I’m glad to have it out there, with its reach to an audience I would never manage on my own. (Hell, we need far more of it!)

But it’s nonetheless clear that, although everyone in this clip is at least gun-friendly, none of them are really what I would call gunnies; the discussion itself contains numerous minor errors of fact (either good faith conjecture or repeating of upstream misinformation, I’d wager, but erroneous nonetheless) or omissions of important context. Yes, I understand that some of that is in the category of the truly trivial, but I’d also bet that both Viva Frei and Robert Barnes (both of whom I very much admire) would probably appreciate that some of the differences might well be important enough to matter, in a rigorous or legally-binding context; indeed, their specialty is often helping the legal layman to understand how important minor turns of phrase or emphasis can be, across a variety of subjects.

Here, of course, the main discussion is of responsibility and political opportunism, and this they all cover excellently; again, I’m happy that people with their reach are discussing it soberly, and well. But a part of me still winces at some of the nerdy bits that I can so easily see leading to downstream misunderstanding, in this and other areas. See, I really want more thinking, critical people like Tim Pool and this crowd of characters, to actually become gunnies, and keep the art and practice of uppity peasantry alive, and to that end, the perfectionist in me always wants the details to be unassailably right. Yes, I are a nerd, but in my own defense, most of those neuroses are usually directed at something important, whether important-now or important-later.

One more observation. Again, details are flying around still, but I’m seeing it reported that the production’s armorer is the daughter of the great Thell Reed, and that in the context of all this she has not exactly cut much of a sympathetic figure. Somehow this makes me sad. It’s not that I somehow know Thell Reed or anything; my knowledge of him is simply in the context of his important part in the development of modern pistol shooting, with fellow Masters Jeff Cooper, Ray Chapman, Elden Carl, Jack Weaver, and John Plähn. I’d long known that Reed had found a respected career in working with film productions, but I know little of his personality other than what Jeff Cooper and Elden Carl have written about him, and of course this is the first I’d ever heard of his daughter.

If the claims I’ve read thus far are true, it’s…bad. Gross negligence at the least. And I have to admit I find myself hoping that it’s not true, which is of course not impartial, but nonetheless there it is.

Who knows if the whole truth will ever come out, of course. Betting money would instead be on spinning this whole thing into an expanded role for Alec Baldwin in the War On Guns [And All Of Us].

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* Yes, I know that some single-action revolvers can also discharge from an external blow to the hammer if it is resting on a live round, but as far as I can tell, nobody is alleging that in this case.
** If you’ve already determined that, as part of the movie’s commitment to realism, some people are going to fire guns at each other, trusting in procedure and/or specialized equipment to stand in place of Rules Two, Three, and Four (and, at least arguably, Rule One as well), then hell yeah, I’d say it’s problematic. Too much so for me. I’m not sure I could ever do it, myself–a movie–for the same reasons I can’t personally stomach Airsoft skirmishing.