You can’t breach gun safety rules
RTHE ONLY time my grandfather ever told me off was over my handling of a gun. It was so unusual to see him angry with me, I have never forgotten it.
We were walking across his fields – he was a Shropshire farmer – on our way to a little pasture where I was to be given a shooting lesson. My grandfather routinely used shotguns on his farm and had been a rifleman in the trenches during the First World War.
I was proudly carrying my birthday present from him, a .22 Webley & Scott air rifle, over the crook of one arm.At 11 years old, I felt very grown up and excited.
Suddenly he stopped in midstride and glared at me.
“Give me that. Give me the gun. Now. Barrel pointing at the ground, please.”
Bewildered, I handed my present over. “What’s wrong, grandad? What have I done?”
He was icy. “It was pointing at me.You let it swing around and it was pointing at me. Never, EVER point a gun at anyone.We’re going back to the farm. I’m confiscating this for a week.”
“But it’s not loaded, grandad! And I didn’t mean to point it at you! It was a mistake!”
The old man was implacable. “We treat every gun as if it is loaded, Richard.”
My present was locked away for seven days – a punishment that taught me a lesson I would not forget. Never, EVER point a gun at anyone. Always, ALWAYS assume it is loaded. There is no such thing as a “cold” gun, and certainly not when there are other people around.
These are universal rules so it is utterly astonishing that a crew member on the set of Alec Baldwin’s new western Rust was accidentally shot dead last week.
I am not moralising or making any judgment of Baldwin himself, who was holding the prop weapon involved and is devastated by the tragedy. But clearly there was a breakdown of the rules and protocols governing the use of guns on a film set – or anywhere else, for that matter – otherwise the accident simply wouldn’t and couldn’t have happened.
Already multiple failures appear to have been identified – an inexperienced armourer; a live round somehow being loaded into the vintage Colt revolver instead of a safer blank (although even blanks can be lethal at close range); and reportedly the actor himself, as he rehearsed a scene, drawing the weapon (which he believed was unloaded) and pointing it at a camera with the doomed cinematographer standing directly behind it.
The gun went off, and 42-year-old Halyna Hutchins was struck and died soon after in hospital.
It was only when I was older that I learned why my grandfather was so icily angry with me that day in the fields.A close friend and comrade in the trenches had accidentally shot himself dead while cleaning his rifle, the very day before their platoon was due to be relieved. Grandad never forgot it.
Hollywood must learn its own enduring lesson from Halyna Hutchins’s dreadful death in the desert.