The accidental shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins gave prominence to the debate over gun safety and prevention on film sets. Tragedies such as Hutchins’s death on the set of Rust are often followed by calls for significant changes, and this was no different.
“Every film/TV set that uses guns, fake or otherwise, should have a police officer on set, hired by the production, to specifically monitor weapons safety,” Alec Baldwin, the actor who fired the fatal shot, posted on his Instagram.
This call makes very little sense, but it illuminates a pervasive cultural instinct on gun safety: Just get someone with a law enforcement or military background involved, and breathe easier.
You see it all the time in news media. Former law enforcement officials or military personnel are asked to opine on how guns or gun laws work. It doesn’t matter if that person’s position had anything to do with firearms or if they’ve even fired a gun in the past decade.
The mistake is to some extent understandable. People in law enforcement or the military take gun safety training at some point in their career. So, everyone who ever served must know everything there is to know about guns. Right?
Well, of course, that’s not actually the case. Many military members only ever go through basic training and never handle a gun again after that point. Police officers in most major departments, even ones on active duty, are only required to requalify twice a year after their own training courses.
Obviously, there are lots of officers and veterans who are highly skilled with firearms and capable of providing competent gun safety training or oversight. But the overall trope is a misconception and often leads to embarrassing mistakes.
“Now, those are single shots,” retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling told a CNN reporter in a now-famous segment on AR-15s. “If I wanted to fire this on full-semi-automatic, all I do is keep firing.”
Of course, there is no such thing as “full-semi-automatic.” It’s a bit like describing your car as “automatic manual.” Hertling faced enough mockery over the gaffe that he eventually took to Twitter and apologized for the made-up term. But not before it was turned into a meme and even a shirt.
This is a common phenomenon in media. It is often former military or law enforcement pundits on cable news who make the most absurdly false statements about guns and gun laws.
In the case of Baldwin’s suggestion, the results of assuming any officer is qualified to oversee gun safety on a Hollywood set could be far more than just embarrassing: It could be dangerous.
Even if an officer has recently undergone gun safety training, which is not a given, they aren’t necessarily trained in the best practices of enforcing those rules for others. And, of course, entertainment productions often require adapting to situations that even a trained range safety officer would not have to confront at a commercial shooting range.
How do you control the chain of custody for all ammunition and firearms that are going to come on set? How do you ensure nobody brings any unauthorized ammunition on set? How do you make it easy to tell the difference between live rounds, which shouldn’t be there at all, blanks, and dummy rounds not just for yourself but for everyone else who might handle them?
What is your procedure for checking the guns before each shot? How do you help set up scenes in ways that ensure nobody has a gun pointed at them even if the shot requires a gun be pointed at the camera or appear to be pointed at another actor?
These are all questions that weren’t properly answered on the set of Rust and which led to the fatal accident. They are also ones I highly doubt any officer who doesn’t already work as a set armorer has ever had to answer. This is a specialized safety position that requires particular training.
What’s required to keep these kinds of horrific accidents from happening are dedicated professionals who abide by the safety rules above all else. And that’s how most sets operate. That’s exactly why these kinds of accidents have been so rare.
Most productions hire enough staff with enough experience to provide proper oversight of any firearms they use and follow their direction without cutting corners.
Most productions don’t allow guns to be handled without the ammunition being checked before each scene. Most productions don’t allow anyone to be positioned where a gun is going to be pointed. Most productions hold safety briefings to explain the rules in place properly to prevent accidents and why they’re necessary.
As a result, most productions don’t have fatal shooting accidents.
Negligence is what caused this, and it began long before the shot was fired. From cutting corners on staff to rushing production to multiple people handling a gun without checking to see what it was loaded with to pointing the gun at crew members to pulling the trigger. It’s negligence all the way down, and adding a random officer to the mix is unlikely to have stopped it.
Stephen Gutowski, founder of the Reload, is an award-winning journalist who reports on firearms policy and politics. He has appeared on the cover of Time, and his work has been featured in every major news publication across the ideological spectrum from Fox News to the New York Times.
