In the recent matter of Alec Baldwin’s negligent shooting of two of his colleagues on a movie set, I’m seeing a lot of discussion about how prop guns and blank rounds work, about who might have been responsible for bringing live rounds onto the set or loading one into Baldwin’s prop gun, and a lot of other topics that seem incidental to what I take to be the central question:
Why did Baldwin point a gun whose status he didn’t verify at another person and pull the trigger?
Note that, unlike the journalists reporting this story, I used the word negligent instead of the word accidental. An accident is something that happens to you. Negligence is something you do.
When I teach gun safety to new shooters, I tell them that in order for something tragic to happen, you have to make not one, not two, but three mistakes simultaneously. And all of these mistakes are easily avoidable. (1) You have to think the gun is unloaded when it’s not. (2) You have to point the gun at something that can’t be replaced. (3) You have to pull the trigger when you shouldn’t.
If you make only two of those mistakes, the worst that happens is that something replaceable gets broken, or someone gets frightened.
I also emphasize to new shooters that you can’t check too often to see whether a gun is loaded. If I check it and hand it to you, what do you do? You check it again. If you hand it right back to me, what do I do? I check it again. Verifying the status of a gun — even a ‘prop gun’, which, if it can shoot normal ammunition, is really just a ‘gun’ — isn’t something you ever trust to anyone else.
So let’s be clear about what happened in this incident. Baldwin made three simultaneous mistakes: He pointed a gun whose status he didn’t verify at another person and pulled the trigger.
He wouldn’t have made any of these mistakes if he’d spent even a few minutes bothering to learn about gun safety, and if he’d accepted that regardless of what anyone else may have told him about what was going on, it was his responsibility to check and control the weapon once it was in his hands.
The death of Halyna Hutchins and the wounding of Joel Souza were not accidental. They were negligent. The distinction is crucial, and a discussion of Baldwin’s negligence ought to become a standard part of any gun safety course — and his enduring legacy on the issue of gun control.
