Texas needs to watch and learn
The recent fatal shooting on a movie set has spurred calls for tougher safety rules.
Vexing questions remain about what actually happened Oct. 21 on the set of a movie being made near Santa Fe, N.M., when an antique
Colt .45 discharged as it was being used as a prop by actor Alec Baldwin during rehearsal of a scene. A projectile from the revolver struck and killed Halyna Hutchins, director of photography on the movie, a Western called “Rust.” Joel Souza, the director, was standing beside Hutchins and was injured.
The tragic incident prompted understandable anguish on the part of all who knew the 42-year-old Hutchins, a highly regarded cinematographer, as well as a wife and mother. Ongoing police investigations are asking how a gun that was declared “cold” — that is, safe to fire — as it was handed to Baldwin could have killed someone.
What happened on a New Mexico movie set also should prompt serious soul-searching far beyond the movie industry. We have in mind those among us who don’t take firearms seriously enough. Texas elected officials, careless in their Second Amendment convictions and craven in their kowtowing to gun-rights zealots, come to mind immediately.
Similar accidents on movie sets have happened before, although they are rare, thanks in large part to strict safety rules. A 2016 Associated Press investigation found that at least 43 people had died on sets in the U.S., going back to 1990; more than 150 had suffered serious injuries. A tiny percentage of those deaths were specifically attributed to firearms being used as props, even though guns are integral to countless movies.
The gun death most often remembered is that of 28-year-old Brandon Lee, son of the late martial arts star Bruce Lee. The younger Lee died in 1993 while filming a scene for the movie “The Crow” after being hit by a .44-caliber slug fired from a prop gun supposed to have been filled only with blank rounds.
Lee’s death was the last recorded accidental death by a gun that was being used as a prop on a movie set. Nearly a decade prior, actor Jon-Erik Hexum was killed on the set of the TV series “Cover Up.” He shot himself in the head while playing Russian roulette with a gun loaded with blanks, which can still be deadly at very close range.
In large part because of those two deaths, filmmakers today are expected to rigidly adhere to page after page of detailed regulations regarding firearms on set. Their bible, so to speak, is “Safety Bulletin” No. 1, posted anytime a set will involve the use of firearms and compiled and distributed by the Industry-Wide Labor-Management Safety Committee.
In the very first paragraph, the document admonishes: “BLANKS CAN KILL. TREAT ALL FIREARMS AS THOUGH THEY ARE LOADED. ‘LIVE AMMUNITION’ IS NEVER TO BE USED NOR BROUGHT ONTO ANY STUDIO LOT OR STAGE.”
The bulletin goes on to lay out comprehensive instructions for firearms protocol. The general rules include never pointing a firearm at anyone; never placing your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot; knowing where and what your intended target is; no horseplay with any firearms; never discharging a weapon when the barrel is clogged; and never laying down a firearm or leaving it unattended. Additional regulations speak to movie-production specifics.
Those basic instructions, of course, are well-established rules familiar to all who deal with firearms regularly, from law enforcement officers to the military. It includes many members of the National Rifle Association, particularly those members who recall when their organization was dedicated primarily to shooting safety and basic firearms instruction, rather than to high-pressure lobbying and the wholly invented notion of Second Amendment absolutism that it has championed of late.
Mistakes happen, rules are broken and people get careless, but those who know guns best are well aware that rules, regulations and strict protocols save lives.
While cops, soldiers, NRA firearms instructors and responsible gun owners — not to mention Hollywood filmmakers — are usually dead serious about firearms, Texas lawmakers are not. They’re irresponsible “huckleberries” when it comes to gun sense.
A responsible elected official would not have supported legislation in the previously concluded session that makes it almost as easy for an adult Texan to walk into a sporting-goods store and purchase a gun as it is to buy a fishing rod or a camping tent.
Make your choice, put down your credit card and pass a perfunctory background check, and you’re not only a gun owner but fully authorized to carry it with you just about anywhere you want to go. No licensing needed, no training in laws and safety, no demonstrated proficiency in shooting. Just grab that gun and go.
Go to church with it on your hip or in your purse; go to Applebee’s and tuck into the Sizzlin’ Caramel Apple Blondie armed; sit in the stands locked and loaded at Little League games; pray in a pew at church with a pistol on your hip. You’ll never know when and where you’ll have to whip it out and use it, regardless of your skill level or good judgment.
No wonder so many Texas police chiefs opposed the so-called permitless-carry legislation that Gov. Greg Abbott signed in June.
Firearms are ubiquitous on movie sets; deaths and injuries are rare. Firearms are ubiquitous in American society, particularly in Texas and the South; deaths and injuries are anything but rare.
In 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, the highest total in two decades, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. An additional 24,000 people in this country used a gun to kill themselves. Those figures combined are 25 times higher than any other developed nation.
And the state with the highest number of gun deaths in 2020, in 2019, and many years before that? That would be Texas, Our Texas, with 3,683 last year.
Mortality data from 2019, the most recent year for which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported, shows that even on a per-capita basis, gunshots kill more Texans each year than in America’s other largest states, including California, Pennsylvania, Illinois and New York, where fewer than 900 accidental gun deaths took place.
Among the six biggest states, only Florida’s gun death rate matched our own.
In the wake of the tragic New Mexico incident, the movie industry is already considering even stricter rules, including potentially banning real guns on sets, and relying on computer-generated images instead. A senior California lawmaker has already filed a bill that would ban the use of live ammunition, and guns capable of firing it, from sets.
Given Texas’ terrible track record of deadly shootings, including some of the nation’s worst mass shootings, a Texas lawmaker truly committed to the public’s safety would be looking for solutions, too.
Worthy ideas abound: investment in community violence interruption programs, prohibiting individuals convicted of domestic violence crimes from possessing firearms, pushing for secure storage of guns at home, funding gun-violence research, to name a few.
If only ideas and common sense were enough. They aren’t though, not without political courage.
We live in Texas, of course, where gun laws are more relaxed than they were in the real Wild West of Dodge City, Tombstone and Old Tascosa. Until we begin electing lawmakers serious about gun safety and violence prevention, thousands of dead Texans will continue to be collateral damage in our faux Wild West.
To the gun lobby and those irresponsible officials who profess their fealty to it, lax gun laws are more important than life itself.