I was 10 years old the first time my dad took me turkey hunting. I can still remember the safety drill, I’d already heard it a hundred times, even by that age. It was just a single shot .410 but I swear he made me shine a flashlight down the barrel at least five times. He’d ask me “is it unloaded?”, after I’d tell him yes, he’d hit me with the same comeback every single time, “there is no such thing as an unloaded gun.” I was taught to treat every gun like it was loaded, and the second I didn’t was the second it would be locked up.
I love to go shooting, I always have, guns have never made me feel unsafe, people have. I can remember going shooting with the kids from our local church, it was always the same story, the young men who didn’t have guns in their home would want to swing it around, point it at someone, they never knew if it was loaded or not and typically didn’t take it seriously.
As a film producer, I’ve had the chance to use firearms on set a handful of times. With technology, shooting blanks is entirely unnecessary, so firing pins are always removed. Despite using unusable firearms, as a producer I have personally taken it upon myself to make sure a set of mostly anti-gun people felt comfortable. At call time, our assistant director and our armorer would demonstrate to the cast and crew that the fire pins were accurately removed before having people come and shine a light down the barrels. At least twice I can remember an actor or crew member while being shown where to shine a flashlight, grabbing the gun and pointing it up. I don’t often believe in public rebukes but it was certainly the time. The cast and crew needed to know actions like that would not be tolerated, both times I heard the same reply “it’s unloaded.”
You see what happened on the set of the film “Rust” was not the result of weak gun laws, or citizens having “too much access” to firearms, it was a direct result of the opposite. We have an anti-gun actor, firing a gun most likely handed to him by an anti-gun assistant director, carrying out the wishes of a likely anti-gun director. The mainstream media would want us to believe this must have been the safest place on planet earth, so how could this happen? Alec Baldwin has preached about the dangers of firearms for years, without learning what an average 12-year-old learns in a basic hunter safety course.
In the United States each year over 15 million people go hunting, 15 million people carry loaded firearms in the woods along with friends or family members. Despite such high numbers, according to the national safety council, a hunter is still well over 60 times more likely to get in a car accident on their way to a hunt rather than have any type of accident while hunting. Accidents at shooting ranges are even more rare and virtually non-existent.
Hollywood makes billions each year off of gun violence. It’s not uncommon for an actor to play a character that shoots through hoards of people in a movie, but then to go on Twitter and condemn groups like the NRA. They continually condemn the rights of average working class Americans to protect themselves with firearms yet have armed security to protect them.
Alec Baldwin has personally condemned the NRA but at least one cinematographer, Halyna Hutchings, would be alive today had Alec Baldwin or anyone on that set taken an NRA safety course.
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