I know that Alec Baldwin hasn't been formally charged with anything; but, he has access to lawyers and he has to know that civil suits are probable and manslaughter charges are still possible. His interview is the reason why you plead the fifth. He made his case considerably worse.
I know I've had this discussion with people who know guns while not really knowing movies; but, to reiterate, look, if you've seen the Bond movies you've seen a gun pointed toward the camera and fired twenty-seven times without incident. We've been doing it since 1905 with The Great Train Robbery. There's more than a hundred years of history of guns being pointed toward people with very few incidents. That's why the protocols are in place.
That was actually a big problem with Baldwin's defense of himself. He brought up how rare these incidents are while the practice is so common. Well, that just shows that thousands of people have done this with nobody getting hurt and it was when you did it that somebody died.
Yes, Baldwin is culpable insofar as having pulled the trigger. Michael Massee held that portion of the culpability when Brandon Lee was killed.
Baldwin has greater culpability having served in a producer role. Now, I still don't know why they changed the set protocols when it came to firearms aside from a bunch of stupid Covid concerns. I don't know if it was union rules or how the production decided to handle it; but, still, the buck stops at Baldwin.
The armourer is supposed to prep and load the gun. The armorer is supposed to hand the gun to the actor. The armorer and the actor are supposed to go through a final safety check and briefing together.
This production was handling the guns in a game of telephone because they decided to keep the armorer socially distanced. So, the armorer was prepping and loading the guns, they were keeping the guns on a cart, and the AD was passing the guns off to the actors.
That is incredibly stupid and negligent.
The whole point of the protocols is to make sure that no one person can make a mistake that goes unnoticed in a game of telephone with a deadly weapon. It's to make sure that one of the last eyes on the gun before the cameras role is the person best equipped to ensure safety and that the other set of eyes is the person using it.
The idea that a set would handle this in a chain where they assume that the third to last person to check the gun is the armourer before she's to be taken out of the loop, the second to last person to handle the gun is an AD who has a bad history of playing fast and loose with safety and probably couldn't tell the difference between a dummy or a live round even if he did check, and the AD just yells "Cold" as he hands the gun off to an actor and anti-gun activist who just bought what he was told is absolutely insane.