Dave Halls, Alec Baldwin’s assistant director, turns out was fired for the accidental discharge of a weapon on a prior movie set. The plot thickens as affidavits, statements, and witness statements are beginning to gel surrounding the Alec Baldwin movie set shooting that left one person dead and another wounded.

Mainstream media’s latest distraction regarding Baldwin’s culpability is that assistant director, Dave Halls, had been terminated from a previous movie set because of the accidental discharge of a weapon.

“The assistant director on the movie ‘Rust,’ who handed a prop gun to Alec Baldwin before the fatal shooting last week, was previously fired from a film production after a gun incident injured a crew member…Dave Halls was serving as assistant director on the film ‘Freedom’s Path’ in 2019, when a gun ‘unexpectedly discharged’ on set, causing a sound crew member to recoil from the blast, halting production…”

I swear I will spit nails if another news outlet says “prop gun” one more time. If a firearm can be loaded with ammunition—which this one was–it isn’t a prop gun. It’s a real firearm and needs to be treated as such. Why? People get killed that way.

It’s kind of a big rule in Hollywood: don’t put live rounds in the guns used on set.

Hollywood firearm expert says Alec Baldwin broke No. 1 rule of gun safety; crew used gun for off-set ‘fun,’ report says https://t.co/KlJZu263uC

— DieHardTrumper (@ewes19) October 26, 2021

Back to the media’s desire to muddy the waters and sway blame away from their favorite gun control spokesman, Trump-hater, Alec Baldwin. The assistant director did it! Hold that thought, CNN and MSNBS (sic, intentionally).

Before anyone goes spouting off on how much they know about firearms, let me be clear. I know firearms well; I know firearms safety really well. The assistant director yelling “cold gun” to Alec Baldwin does not give Alec Baldwin a pass—despite CNN’s deepest desires to keep their golden boy safe from legal or criminal liability.

Legal insurrection lays out the facts quite nicely.

• That it was Alec Baldwin who was manipulating the gun that fired the projectile that killed Ms. Hutchins.
• That the gun discharged because the trigger was depressed by Baldwin (and not because of some defect in the weapon).
• That the muzzle of the weapon was directed towards Ms. Hutchins by Baldwin when it was fired (e.g., she was not killed by an unpredictable ricochet).
• That the gun contained a live round, the bullet of which struck and killed Ms. Hutchins.
• That Baldwin had the opportunity to inspect the weapon for live ammo before he directed it at Ms. Hutchins and pressed the trigger, killing her.
• And, of course, that there was no justification for the shooting of Ms. Hutchins (e.g., this was not an act of lawful self-defense—which it clearly was not).”

But but but…He was told it was a “cold gun”. It’s the other guy’s fault.

If you have ever been to a gun range, a firearms safety class, or a gun store, you’ll see a crazy thing happen. A person will pull back the slide of a firearm, checking it for live rounds. Seeing none, that person will hand the firearm to the guy or gal next to him and he or she will do the same thing. I’ll be at a gun counter and ask to see a firearm. The clerk will take out the firearm, pull back the slide to check, turn it around to not sweep the muzzle towards me, and I’ll take it. I will then automatically pull back the slide to check for live rounds even though I just witnessed the clerk do it. It is muscle memory. Anyone hands a firearm to anyone, pull back the slide and check for live rounds even though you just watched the guy next to you check it.

Obsession best describes how much people will check, double check, then double check again to make sure a live round it not in that chamber. It is that important. It is an obsession worth doing.

Why? Because I don’t trust that guy or gal with my life. If they are wrong, someone is dead.

Do actors receive this training on how to be this obsessed over firearms safety? Yes. Veteran actor Baldwin certainly has.

“Actors and even sometimes crew will receive training from weapons professionals on gun safety. ‘You spend time with them, showing how a gun works, how you don’t point it at anyone ever, how you keep your finger off the trigger and always point it down,’ [Keith Walters, an art director, says]

Follow that hyperlink regarding training. It goes on to explain the elaborate ways Hollywood prevents actors from actually having to take a direct shot at a person to prevent any kind of accident. In other words, the latest revelations that Alec was shooting a scene where he had the firearm pointed to the camera didn’t need to be set up that way. I would contend that is not the standard way such a scene would be typically set up.  The camera could have been remotely operated, plexiglass shields could have been utilized, or Alec could have shot “off axis” away from a person.

Whether the Baldwin incident was during the filming of a scene or a rehearsal, or while goofing around—this tragedy was preventable. The four rules of firearms safety should always be followed, of course. Ingenious and creative ways to shoot scenes to prevent anyone from being in the line of fire were not utilized.

And then there’s the budget cutting fiasco the movie “Rust” had been plagued with, resulting in colossal inexperience on a set handling firearms. The one person who had experience in anything was the assistant director who had experience in the accidental discharges of firearms. What could go wrong?

“As a producer on ‘Rust,’ Baldwin could be held culpable for the cost-cutting, chaos and eventual hire of a young head armorer with just one stint in said job on her résumé — because…multiple other armorers turned it down over low pay and high stakes, with too many firearms to manage.”

Despite the mainstream media treating Baldwin with kid gloves, no one in the firearms world is going for it. Despite Monday’s revelations regarding the assistant director, few in the firearms handling of Hollywood is accepting these slippery excuses either.

Alec Baldwin oversaw a shoddy movie production fraught with carelessness, most of it his, and inexperience that resulted in a woman being killed.

Featured Image: Alec Baldwin vino a divertirse a El Hormiguero by El Hormiguero via Flickr, license CC Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic, cropped.