Las Vegas Sun Newspaper: Light from a high afternoon sun slanted through the tall windows of the weathered wooden church, catching on the plank floorboards and illuminating the stained glass. Outside, the arid ground of the northern New Mexico foothills stretched for miles — a picturesque setting for an Old West gun battle.
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I clicked on this article to see if there would be more information given in terms of the appearance of live ammunition on the set of Rust where Halyna Hutchins was shot and killed by a prop gun. The actions of the armorer for the film Hannah Guiterrez Reed as described and outlined in this article was quite unsettling; she states that there should have been no live rounds even on set, yet there was a concerning amount found in the total stash of 500 rounds. It is said in the article that Guiterrez Reed is fairly young and has had very little experience working as an armorer; prior to reading this, a friend had also told me that they researched her career and found out that Guiterrez Reed has a history of being fired from film projects due to carelessness and lack of sufficient knowledge. This is even more disheartening; her irresponsible actions resulted in the loss of a life, which honestly could have been foreseen.
I think that, given the precedent that the armorer was fired due to their carelessness and incompetence, I feel that negligent manslaughter charges may not be so uncalled for.
When you work in a position where someone can die as a result of your actions, you have a very obvious moral obligation to exercise due diligence to ensure that you are being careful.
Having that much live ammunition with the prop weapons leads me to believe that they are loading the prop weapons with live ammunition and taking them firing at a range or something.
Or worse, I fear we will learn in the coming days that the armorer was using the prop weapon during breaks or something of the sort to do target practice with it.
Regardless, I think you can be careless past a certain point where it sort of falls on you. Accidents do happen but where is the line where it goes from an accident and your own carelessness resulting in death? We send people to prison all the time for killing someone while driving drunk so how can this be any different?
There should never be live ammo on a film set or theatrical production – ever. It's terrifying to think of how many hands the gun went through before it went to the actor. Whenever I have worked with theatrical weapons on a production there has always been a checks-and-balance system for every hand-off, with at least two people checking to make sure the correct fake weapon is being used (rubber knife, rubber firearm, etc.). This checking of the fake weapons has been on small productions, so to think that a large production such as a film set was not implementing this life-saving checks-and-balance safety system is mind-boggling. I understand that the trained IATSE crew walked offset that day due to safety concerns, and I bet that the Producers on the project that pushed everyone to keep working despite of this will be living with the guilt of what occurred for a very long time.
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