And now Thell Reed weighs in on the Rust circus.

I missed this when it first appeared, and I’ve got no particular desire to send any traffic at all to the clowns at Good Morning America, but since I was already wondering about how Thell Reed’s daughter could have strayed quite as far from the tree as it appeared originally, … well, apparently Thell ain’t buying the circus either:

Now, obviously he’s not an impartial party here, being Hannah’s father, but his reputation and history make pretty clear he’s no fool, either, and at least from my chair I’d consider this an important addition to the incident landscape. And while it’s fair to say that I do not trust Good Morning America for impartiality in pretty much anything at all, the coverage of Reed himself nonetheless struck me as actual reporting, and I’ll call out kudos to Kaylee Hartung for that segment.

For his part, Baldwin seems to be conducting an ongoing public masterclass in How To Be An Idiot By Assuming You’re The Smartest Person In The Room At All Times. Holy freakin’ balls, Batman; I mean, I figured there would be some flurry of CYA before everyone involved lawyered up and went to ground for the duration of the investigation, but dayum, even with the incredible kid-glove softball of a Stephanopoulos interview (see below for a Viva Frei take on that specifically), the sheer hubristic chutzpah of this arrogant, entitled elite stands out even amidst the background of the larger ongoing clown show we are faced with every freakin’ day now. (Roll around in your mind, for a moment, just what it would take to do that! And yet here we are.)

The gun, of course, did not fire itself*. Clearly (and presuming murder was not his intention), Baldwin did not check it. And Baldwin is not merely an actor in the production; he is involved at the producer level as well. This, alone, should be enough to earn him both a pretty massive civil lawsuit and, I would think, some sort of criminal prosecution for negligence, or something similar, for the production’s liability in the matter. Beyond that, of course, there is still chatter flying around about both corner-cutting at the expense of safety, and also about possible intentional malfeasance or sabotage (interesting to hear Thell Reed, here, saying that such might well be possible–even though his usefulness as an expert is limited because he’s Hannah’s father), but regardless of that, the above still stands.

Clearly, someone loaded that gun, either intentionally or unintentionally, and from there, one or more people in its chain of custody failed to check it, including but not limited to Alec Baldwin at the loud end of the chain. In any sane system of law, he himself should be well and truly ruined by this; as I see it, the best he could “hope for” would be that someone intentionally loaded that gun, but as any “gunnie” knows, even that does NOT absolve you from checking the damn thing yourself.

And Baldwin trying to play the victim in all this is just further evidence of how awful the entitlement of the elites has become. Here’s Viva Frei’s take on the Stephanopoulos puffball interview, very much worth the watch from the legal angle (and Viva’s just an infectiously good guy, too):

We’ll see, of course, how the CYA circus winds up, and then what lengths the Cool Kids Cult will go to, to absolve one of their own. In the meantime, it’s at least interesting to see Thell Reed himself appear and comment on Hannah, who it’s increasingly sounding like was not present for the incident at hand, possibly torn between two roles and not happy about that.

_______________________________________
*Consider this: if this had indeed been a gun prone to malfunction–e.g., if the half-cock notch on the hammer was broken or removed–that would be trivially easy to test, and were that the case we would have heard about it already, with the result dutifully leaked to an Establishment eager to exonerate one of its own at any opportunity. So, I’ll say it again: the gun did not fire itself.