Here’s the latest, from the New York Post, on Alec Baldwin’s attempts to evade responsibility for shooting two people on the set of his movie Rust.
Santa Fe District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies told Vanity Fair she had watched Alec Baldwin’s bombshell interview with ABC in December and was drawn to the actor’s claim that he did not pull the trigger.
“You can pull the hammer back without actually pulling the trigger and without actually locking it,” Carmack-Altwies said. “So you pull it back partway, it doesn’t lock, and then if you let it go, the firing pin can hit the primer of the bullet.”
This is clearly coming from someone who’s never tried it. I’ve tried it, and so have a lot of other people, and anyone who actually tries it will see that while the firing pin can touch the primer, it can’t do so with enough force to set it off — sort of like trying to break an egg by hitting it with a feather.
But interestingly, she claims to have tried it:
The DA requested that one of her investigators bring his old-style revolver to her office to test if a mechanical malfunction could have caused the gun to go off. They cleared a room, and she had two investigators inspect the gun to confirm it was not loaded.
Her test revealed that the hammer could have caused the live round to fire.
But wait — if the gun was unloaded, how could she conclude anything about whether the hammer could cause a round to fire? With an unloaded gun, the most you can conclude is that the hammer could reach the primer, not that it could strike it with enough force to set it off.
If you’re not clear on the difference, find a boxer or other martial artist, and ask him to reach your face, and then to strike your face. Report your findings in the comments section below.
Absent video of a hammer being dropped and a primer going off, we have to conclude that her ‘test’ didn’t ‘reveal’ anything — except her own desire to find any excuse at all not to prosecute this case.
This is what trials are for. Let’s have a trial, and the defense do a real test — loading blanks into a revolver, dropping the hammer from the pre-locking distance of 1/4 inch, and seeing if the gun goes off — in front of a jury. To give the defense the benefit of the doubt, they can try it 100 times — or 1000 times — and see if the primer ever goes off.
It won’t. And then the jury can draw its own conclusions — instead of being denied that opportunity by a district attorney who, by her own admission, ‘doesn’t know too much about guns, certainly not about 1850s-era revolvers’.
