Kat Rosenfeld, writing for The Free Press and attempting to defend Alec Baldwin and his negligence on the set of his movie Rust, looked to lay off the hue and cry over his shooting two people, killing one, with an “unloaded” gun, and Baldwin’s trial for that, on the man’s status as an old, white, rich and famous man.
Then she used a wholly inapt analogy in her attempt to excuse his negligence. She likened Baldwin’s mishandling (my term here, not Rosenfeld’s) of the revolver that was handed to him to a party-goer being handed a lit stick of supposedly fake dynamite, the party-goer then passing the stick back to the one who’d handed it to him, and then the stick—real dynamite, it turns out—detonates.
It’s a bad analogy: there was no way for the two individuals to ascertain whether the supposedly fake dynamite was, in fact, fake.
There was, however, opportunity—and obligation—for Baldwin to ascertain whether the revolver he’d just been handed was, in fact, loaded only with blanks and that no live rounds were in the cylinder.
It doesn’t matter that the man who’d handed the revolver to Baldwin had himself just checked the firearm for live rounds when he’d picked it up to hand to Baldwin. It doesn’t matter whether the man had then told Baldwin it had no live rounds or whether Baldwin had witnessed the other man’s check. It is every firearm handler’s obligation to personally check the firearm for live rounds. It’s no insult to the one who just did the check before handing the firearm over; the receiving man must check for himself that the firearm has no live rounds.
Full stop.
It’s easy enough, too, to flip the cylinder out and check. It’s easy enough, further, to dump the loaded rounds into the palm of a hand, or onto a nearby shelf, or even onto the ground, and inspect the rounds so ejected to see whether they’re all blanks or if one or more live rounds have gotten into the mix.
Baldwin chose—negligently—not to do so. And from his negligence, a woman was killed and a man severely injured because Baldwin pointed the revolver he’d just been handed at them—also negligently, since the scene being filmed wasn’t ready for him to do that; he was just playing around—and he squeezed the trigger. That the trigger squeeze at that point may have been unintended by Baldwin is just another act of his negligence.
It was a tragic but accidental death, Rosenfeld insisted. Nobody is arguing otherwise. The accidental nature of the killing and wounding, though, in no way alters the fact of Baldwin’s atrocious negligence in mishandling the revolver in his hand. It’s Baldwin’s negligence that led to the tragic but accidental death and the nearly as tragic and just as accidental wounding, and Baldwin’s negligence is what has led to his felony trial, not any “get the celebrity” nonsense nor any gross authoritarianism.
