The fatal shooting on the film set of Rust last week may have been unintentional, but it was not an accident.
Hollywood’s immediate impulse has been to cast Alec Baldwin as the victim — almost as much as cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, whom he unwittingly shot to death. But it’s clear that the negligence of at least one person, if not several, caused this entirely preventable tragedy.
Baldwin, the lead actor and also the producer of Rust, had a personnel problem even before filming began. The producers hired an utterly unqualified 24-year-old as the film’s armorer. During her only other prior production as armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed reportedly handed a weapon to an 11-year-old actress without properly checking it. On a podcast before the shooting, she admitted that she almost rejected the Rust job because she wasn’t sure if she was ready.
David Halls, the assistant director who ultimately handed Baldwin the gun that he killed Hutchins with, had previously been fired from a different production after an accidental gun discharge injured a crew member.
Moreover, the conditions on set made such an incident highly likely. Employees were overworked and forced to drive an hour to and from an Albuquerque hotel each day, despite the producers’ earlier promise that they would pay for hotel rooms much closer to the rural set. Even before the fatal shooting, there were three incidents of a gun accidentally firing, leading to further staff complaints about safety. Ultimately, union crew members went on strike, leaving the production understaffed.
Then there was the malpractice in the immediate steps leading to the killing of Hutchins. According to the search warrants, Gutierrez-Reed had prepared three guns and kept them all, supposedly for COVID-related reasons, on a cart outside the church where Baldwin was filming. Halls selected one of the guns, and while giving it to Baldwin, he announced it was a “cold gun,” industry-speak for a gun lacking live rounds. Then, while modeling to Hutchins and director Joel Souza, both directly behind the camera, how he was going to aim the gun into the camera once film started rolling, Baldwin pulled the trigger, killing Hutchins and landing Souza in the hospital with a single shot.
As to why the gun contained live rounds, crew members had evidently used them for “plinking,” or playing target practice with beer cans, during breaks. That’s dangerous and unprofessional enough on an action movie set, but even worse is why Baldwin didn’t know that the gun had live rounds. Apparently nobody — not the armorer, not the assistant director who selected the gun, not the actor responsible for firing it — thought to check before aiming it directly at two human beings.
The entire production seemed to fail at following the most basic rules of firearm safety. From the staffing down to the negligence of the armorer and the assistant director, the Rust set was bound for disaster. There were several points of failure, but one single action, fundamental to firearm safety, could have prevented this: Baldwin just had to behave as though the gun were fully loaded until he had checked for himself. Had he only done that, Hutchins would still be alive today.
Baldwin is no murderer — the only thing he is a victim of is his own negligence. Hutchins’s death ought not to be politicized, but the next time Hollywood decides to weigh in on gun control, consider whether people unable to follow basic gun safety protocols should be responsible for designing gun policy.
