For those of you saying the actor should have checked the firearm and made sure it was empty, I think you are misunderstanding the issue. From the reporting I've read, the gun in question was a Colt Single Action revolver. The big issue with revolvers is you can see into the cylinder and tell whether the gun is loaded or not. It's one of the first things I look for in any scene that has a revolver that faces the camera - if the cylinders are empty the scene loses all credibility. So unlike a firearm that uses a magazine where the cartridges are not visible, revolvers require dummy rounds to look realistic. In revolvers wax bullets (or some similar material) are often used if the open cylinder will be visible during firing. Oftentimes the cartridges will be loaded with just a primer, which is enough to fire the wax bullet. The wax can still dangerous but under the vast majority of circumstances not lethal. But they can be made to look identical to normal cartridges, which is the point.
So to say that the actor should have checked and made sure the gun was empty does not apply here. Actors and everyone else on the set rely on the armorer to make sure guns, whether prop or real, are safe for the scene in which they are to be used. Discharging a firearm directly at the camera is very common in movies. And think of the thousands of movie scenes that show an actor loading rounds into a magazine and then into a firearm and cocking it to make sure it is loaded. By the logic of making sure the gun should be unloaded such scenes could never have been filmed.
It's been stated in the press that the scene being filmed had the actor shooting directly at the camera. So the actor did exactly what he was supposed to do. If you are blaming the actor you might as well blame the screen writer for writing that action.
In my mind, the real fault lies with the armorer and the AD who picked up the firearm and handed it to the actor. The armorer's primary responsibility is safety. The AD should have verified with the armorer that the gun was in fact a 'cold gun' before passing it along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_and_television_accidents
A bit late to this thread, but this is 100% correct. When you're dealing with a set of circumstances that require a firearm to really look the part from every angle, a simple visual check performed by a cast member is not going to cut it. The armorer is (or at least should be) far more experienced in telling the difference between a cold gun and a hot one, and has more advanced tools available than the Mark I Double Eyeball Assembly.
One very basic bit of set etiquette is that everyone does their own job and doesn't step on others' toes. This is important when you've got people with diverse but not necessarily overlapping skill sets working in very close proximity, and every team is going to have specific safety challenges come up. It might be high-voltage electrical equipment, it might be lights hot enough to make toast, it might be deep water, it might be pyrotechnics, it might be potentially aggressive animals, it might be something as mundane as extension cords posing a trip hazard if they're not taped to the floor.
Everybody's safety consciousness is tailored to their specific job duties, and it's up to the head of the respective teams to verify that they're operating safely. Critically, each of these teams reports to the AD. Often there will be a safety meeting and everyone will receive a
basic level of instruction to avoid on-set hazards, but verifying that the camera-ready ammunition in a revolver is indeed fake is a little outside the area of expertise of even a prominent actor like Baldwin.
My guess is that his instructions to Baldwin were something like "For some shots, this revolver will be loaded with blanks. For other shots it will be loaded with inert rounds. They look real, but won't actually fire. In either case, please only use it as indicated by the script and the director. Don't play around with it during or between takes. Even blanks can still hurt you or somebody else if you're not careful. Give it back to the armorer once we're done shooting with it."
And normally that works. This time it just didn't, because the supposedly inert rounds were anything but.
TL;DR Baldwin
probably did exactly what was expected and required of him, while Hutchins and Souza fell victim to negligence from the armorer in question and possibly the AD.
You'd think a rocketry forum would recognize that there's more than one safe way to do things. Sure, the NAR Model Rocket Safety Code specifies less than 125 grams of propellant and less than 320 N-s of total impulse, but that and many other traditional rules can be set aside by going through the relevant certification process and obeying additional rules.
Similarly, the traditional wisdom of never pointing a firearm at something that you're not willing to shoot can be set aside if required for specialized situations, as long as other safety considerations are followed stringently. Thus, you
can have extremely convincing guns "fired" at the camera in movies while also keeping the odds of an injurious or fatal accident very low (this obviously being one those times where the odds are beaten). But the dozens of other precautions that must be put in place to allow an actor to safely "fire" a gun at the camera definitely put it in "don't try this at home" territory.
