The Alec Baldwin tragedy exposes issues in the film industry
Oct. 21 was supposed to be a typical rehearsal day for the cast and crew of the upcoming western movie “Rust,” starring Alec Baldwin. While running a scene that involved Baldwin’s character pointing a gun to the camera, he pulled the trigger, unaware of the real bullets inside of the weapon. He hit young cinematographer Halyna Hutchins who died later that day and injured director Joel Souza. Although people speculate that this devastating event is due to a reckless actor, the blame should truly fall to an industry without proper gun safety laws.
What should be obvious about this situation is that the investigation is ongoing. People have called attention to the armorer of the production for being at fault even though her legal team claims she did not see any bullets in the magazine before handing the weapon off. The media has also rushed to call out the assistant director as he was the one who handed the gun to Baldwin. What people fail to realize is that this information is a distraction to truly see who, or what, is to blame. This is the fault of the film union’s failure to address the ever prevalent dangers of handling a gun.
Seeing the cracks in the film industry’s gun safety procedures and how they led to this event is not a hard feat. There are no official rules from the federal government regarding gun safety on film sets. Productions tend to follow union guidelines, but they are not in the least bit definitive or effective. They are simply suggestions which means that legal action interferes only after a tragedy has taken place. Despite being a professional production, there were no expectations for set regulations for how to handle a lethal weapon, specifically a gun, on set. Complaints about this problem have been ongoing, even before the accident that took place on the “Rust” set. Crew members had actually left the set because of the poor weapon protection. The Baldwin incident is sadly another result from the lack of gun safety in the movie industry.
Crew members recall Baldwin being especially careful with handling the weapon. Yet, the first wave of responses from the media all gave Baldwin the short end of the stick. The devastating scene was taken advantage of by pro-gun campaigns, including t-shirts being made that said, “Guns don’t kill people, Alec Baldwin does.” The ignorance of trauma towards family members of Halyna, Baldwin and the innocent members of the cast and crew is largely disheartening. There was little respect demonstrated towards the young life that was lost, especially from an accident that was directly the fault of weak regulations and not one individual.
