Four Rules....and...When Blanks Aren't.

Someone should have told John Eric Hexum.

 

The political irony is thick.

AB wants to require a police officer on set to handle or supervise all firearms. Based on the very wide variations I've seen among beat officers -- including walking into the concession area next to the officer line of a match, and suddenly finding myself looking straight down the barrel of a revolver held up by an officer wearing a Long Beach PD cap, prompting me to scurry back to the civilian / Olympian zone -- I would reject that as insufficient. Require something closer to a department's certified firearms instructors or range safety officers.

There are plenty of experts around, so actual LEO status needn't be part of the requirement. The film industry already has a bunch of experienced choices.

Another requirement I'd suggest: require all Directors, Assistant Directors, and actors who will touch or be close to a firearm, to pass a basic firearms safety course. E.g. a state hunter safety course (such as typically loaded with 12 year old hunters fulfilling license prerequisites), or an NRA basic safety course, or equivalent. Such training appears very blatantly lacking, or ignored, in the recent tragedy.

Cameras on the business end of a muzzle should be run by remote control.

"One in a trillion chance"? What absolute effing bovine excrement. On a logarithmic scale, with the 'skills' displayed by that staff, it was much closer to Russian Roulette. Especially after several previous unintended discharges and other red flags on the set.

I also must ask: why are certain celebrities who are unfriendly to one amendment, so addicted to exercising another amendment to portray and glorify gun violence for profit? If film industry portrayals can mostly remove smoking, encourage use of seatbelts, discourage drunk driving, and encourage numerous other positive behaviors, then it seems they could also cut way back on their extremely high volume of gun abuse and violence. Copycatting is real, so lead by example.

But they don't. They are addicted to it. Follow the money.

 

Once upon a time, there were 10 basic gun safety rules - such that that one year later (see date stamped photo) no unintended targets were harmed.



Even so, many folks that have memorized gun safety rules still create tragedy and ought to have never been allowed to touch deadly weapons.
Our daughter won't let her ten-year-old son mess with his boy scout pocket knife unless she is supervising. As John love love LOVES to say, know your audience.
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My dad got his training in the rules from dot . mil, and he's the one who trained me, and he knew them well, and trained me well.

All the same, the old house (burned in 1989, so you won't find the evidence now) had a small round hole in the family room ceiling that he had put there in one moment of inattention (no injuries involved).

There was one similar hole in the same ceiling that mom put there on one occasion, making them even. (Also no injuries.)

It has been my own experience that the times I mess up the most (in whatever kind of work I might be doing) are the moments where I'm starting to feel like I've really got it down, and my thinking starts to multitask a little.

Luckily for me, most of the kinds of work I do don't make holes in things. (Or make the holes more slowly. With a drill, at least you can say "wait! I don't want a hole in this" and stop drilling.)

 

It's been a while now since I was reading about the most recent Hollywood incident, but I remember coming away with the sense that it was largely reckless behavior by crew members responsible for providing the gun to the person holding it.

I suppose in an ideal world you would also want the actors to check the chamber personally, even after the prop master or armorer has told them "COLD GUN".

I wonder if that's in the usual on-set rules?

I also wonder how far that could practically go ... does the actor extract the cartridge to make sure it looks like a blank?

 

At least the little holes were in the ceiling, not at chest or head level in a wall. Failures on some procedures were covered (rescued) by adherence to others. It illustrates the reason for having multiple overlapping rules. Redundancy. One or two failures did not cascade into a tragedy.

The same redundancy concept was a necessary component for getting commercial aviation up to its current safety level. The overall system failure rate is much lower than the individual component failure rate.

I have often felt reason to disassemble a certain piece for storage or transport. A necessary step for disassembly is to dry-fire it. Despite conscientiously going through the checklist, there is always a gnawing feeling that there may eventually be a little hole in the floor to the crawl space and a chip in the foundation. But better there than in a neighbor's wall.

It has long been clear to me that I don't multitask as well as other people. Or at least, not as well as they think they do for themselves, and frequently try to demand of me.

 

In cases of this sort, I'm not a believer in loading all post-incident responsibility onto a single person. Just as the safety rules list has multiple overlapping items for redundancy, final responsibility for an incident can be assigned to potentially everyone in the chain of custody, and in the production's supervisory chain of command for safety. Each of them had the power to prevent the incident. It happened because all of them failed.

Special woes to anyone occupying multiple positions in those chains.

Growing up in one of the states among the highest in firearms ownership (and consistently low in gun crimes), my school district provided a gun- and hunter-safety training day to all 7th graders. It included a field trip to the local National Guard Armory for live fire practice, the only time I've ever fired .22 shorts.

Considering all the driver and traffic safety education, alcohol safety awareness, drug safety, and sex education now provided by our schools, I just can't imagine why basic gun safety (live fire practice not necessary) isn't also universally included. Except for partisan politics, the very same reason my school had no meaningful sex education at that time. That district now has both gun and sex education. But over here, in an opposite partisan polarity zone, all the schools have only the later.

 

gun safety rules are one thing, and laws are another. hollywood already has the rules, but they are voluntary. ignore at your own risk, and the risk of others.
laws provide the threat of punishmentfor criminal behavior.rules provide for negligence.
either way, people will find a way around them, purposefully or accidentally.

this case has a long way to go, and the ending will be interesting.

i read yesterday that there are so many movies being made in new mexico, that there aren't any trained armorers available.
i'm on the side of no real guns being allowed. do the best you can with cgi, people aren't going to stop watching movies until something better comes along.

 

My weapon requires a dry fire in order to remove the slide for cleaning. I have that same nervous feeling even though I know I just removed the magazine and cleared the chamber. And it even has a little cutout so you can see if there's a round in the chamber without moving the slide. I still point it where it won't damage anything important and won't ricochet back at me.

As for blame in the Rust incident, there's plenty to go around. I'd 100% blame the people supposedly plinking with the props. And 100% blame each person who handled the weapon. And to top it off, the producers and directors who did not get the proper training, see that each person involved had it, and that the rules were followed without exception -- 100% on each of them. And Baldwin himself should have insisted on being trained and then on following proper safety protocols. Because, if any single one in that chain would have done things properly, there would not have been a negligent discharge.

It ain't complicated. But, as they learned, it is important.

 

I'm more accustomed to removing the magazine, then drawing the action back to eject a chambered round or to clearly see that there isn't one, then letting it down easy with the trigger pulled. Have I been doing it wrong? Different piece, different construction maybe.

 

Different design. That works on another piece that I don't carry, but just now verified that it doesn't work on my usual piece.

 

My Ruger LC9S Pro is striker fired, so no hammer to let down easily. It's remove the magazine, rack the slide to clear the chamber. Verify the empty chamber. Dry fire to get the firing mechanism out of the way of the slide removal. Snap the cover out of the way of the retaining pin and push out the pin. Then pull the slide off the rails and continue disassembly.

 

The stuff I was accustomed to also had no (outside visible) hammer; the (internal) one was cocked by the action moving backward (manually the first time, or upon firing thereafter). So manually drawing the action backward to clear the chamber, then holding the trigger while letting it ease forward again, eased the internal hammer at the same time.

I may just have a sort of irrational dislike of dry firing. (Come to think of it, I remember being especially strongly admonished never to dry "fire" a bow.)

 

I haven't had a weapon of any kind (except at the plate, switch hitting, during a baseball game) in a long long time. So any lessons in firearm safety have long since expired. When I was invited to target practice, I could usually get inside the target area from prone. not so much standing.

 

I'm pretty sure the safety lessons have stayed with me, though if it came to a test, my marksmanship would be seen to have fallen off some, I'm sure.