The reporting is instantly biased, of course. If something really fires real bullets, it’s a “gun” not a “prop”. Doesn’t matter what it’s intended USE was, it IS a gun. Heck, Baldwin actually used it at the time as a toy. That doesn’t make it a “toy gun”, it was a gun.
The tragedy is that a woman with a promising future is dead. The good news is, apparently her death is an excellent chance for us all to vomit our politics & opinions everywhere.
I think both of the comments above are quite right, and I don't think they're contrary to each other in any fashion. That is, I don't think that Fr. Krupp's comment is aimed at comments such as that made by Mr. Peters.
Fr. Krupp has a really good point, and it basically had occurred to me already. I don't know that it's particularly unique to our times, but everyone who thinks they have a point to make will come out on Twitter and Facebook and the like with a series of comments, a lot of which will be really dumb.
Let's start with some obvious statements.
First of all, Mr. Baldwin did nothing that's morally blameworthy. Somebody screwed up, for sure, but under the facts and circumstances as we know them, it wasn't him. This is an awful tragedy, but its not one that you can put personal blame on the actor for. It's purely an accident. Indeed, it's at least the third such similar, but not identical, accident of a similar type of which I'm aware of in the movie industry, the first being the death of Jon-Eric Hexum back in the 80s, who was killed when the plastic from a blank round struck him on the temple, and the other being the death of Brandon Lee, who was killed when a portion of a previously shot live round, which was apparently stuck in the barrel, dislodged when a blank round was fired.
And, of course, deaths on movie sets from other causes are hardly unknown.
Okay, so what happened.
Well Baldwin was working on the filming of the movie Rust, which I'd not previously heard of, and I'd guess most of the readers here haven't either. According to the Internet Moview Database, the film's is summarized as follows:
A 13 year-old boy, left to fend for himself and his younger brother following the death of their parents in 1880's Kansas, goes on the run with his long estranged grandfather after he's sentenced to hang for the accidental killing of a local rancher.
I have to say there's an element of strange irony at work here, in that the film is about an accidental killing.
Of note, Baldwin is a co-author of the screenplay and this appears to be very much a project that he's been involved with from its inception.
There apparently had been complaints during the filming by people working on it regarding safety, including the safety of the firearms used in it. During filming, Baldwin was handed a "cold" firearm, likely a handgun, and it turned out to be loaded with live rounds. Therefore, when the pistil discharged, it killed Halyna Hutchins, who was down muzzle of it.
So what can we learn, if anything, about this.
Maybe, quite frankly, nothing whatsoever.
Well, not quite that little.
One thing that we can learn is that the firearms weren't being properly handled.
Accidental deaths from firearms in the United States has declined remarkably over the years, and they're actually quite rare now. In 2019 the total number of deaths from firearms was 39,707, of which a little over 14,000 were homicides. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, there were 19,300, which has been reported as a dramatic rise, but really basically isn't. With a huge section of the population idle, at home, and out of work, we could have expected that.
Suicide accounted for 60% of deaths by firearm in 2019. I don't know what it was in 2020, but looking at the figures, we'd expect it to have gone up some but it might not have much, if at all. Contrary to all the dire warnings, suicide rates went down 5% in 2020, which is also probably due to COVID 19. Lots of people didn't have to go to their crappy jobs for much of that year and were likely happier at home. The pandemic reportedly boosted the level of all sorts of other personal vice, but the much predicted wave of suicide just didn't happen.
Which says a lot about how people view their work.
While I don't have the statistics, accidental deaths from firearms has also really declined over the years. We used to hear about "hunting accidents", and a few happen every year, but quite frankly hunters are likely more at risk driving to the game fields than in them. Wyoming had one such accident this year, which was tragic, and frankly looking at it, it involved a lack of gun safety, but this is also pretty rare anymore.
Indeed, the US isn't anywhere near as violent as the news media would suggestion. There were a little over 20,000 murders total in the US in 2020. Interestingly, crime was overall down in the country (again, the pandemic. . . ) and violent crime went up in cities, but not in rural areas.
None of which seems to have been reported very well, but all of which is true.
Which gets me to the next thing.
I truly don't grasp how this could have happened. Most people who are really familiar with firearms check to see if they're loaded the second they're handed one, save perhaps in a store where they're new. Most hunters compulsively check to see if their own arms are loaded once they get them out of the safe, and then they do it again once they put them away. Even as a soldier, when handed a rifle, I checked to see if it was loaded, even though if it was in the arms room it shouldn't have been.
The other lesson is this. As Ed Peters notes, these movie guns were real guns. They were guns being used as props, not "prop guns". There's obviously a large difference.
Which makes me wonder how many guns movie studios own. Or maybe they don't own them, but rent them from a supplier.
In the wake of the terrible accident, this question is being asked:
Why are real guns still used on film sets? In wake of 'Rust' shooting, their future is in question
It's probably a legitimate question, although I hate to think what that might mean. We already have the example of the absurd John Wick series, which I've watched as a guilty pleasure, glamorizing armed violence in a weird ballet like way. Yes, its completely absurd, but its an absurdity that very realistic CGI has given us.
And It's hard not to assume faked CGI violence becoming the norm doesn't make it all the more appealing to some people.
Something else on this, there have actually been meme's pop up making fun of Baldwin. That's sick.
Image
While we're on the Baldwin tragedy, we should add something about image.
It's no doubt copyrighted by the "armorer" from the movie set Hanna Gutierrez-Reed, age 24, has had a publicity photograph appear in articles in which she's posing in a sultry dreamy eyed manner with two revolvers crossed against her chest and leather bandoliers of ammunition.
There's no reason, I'd note, that a 24 year old couldn't do this job perfectly competently. I was dutied as an armorer for a time in my National Guard unit before I went to basic training, and I was 18 years old at the time and perfectly competent to do it. That's not the point.
The point is that this is really the wrong image.
First of all, every young woman in the movie industry doesn't have to look like she's auditioning for a photo spread in the now out of publication Playboy magazine. And mixing firearm messages and sex messages is flat out weird. Firearms in recent years have already had unfortunate associations made in magazines promoting the concept that just going about your daily business is as risky as delivering a message to the opposition in Damascus. Not hardly. And the introduction of sexy women in the same role that they used to play in tool catalogs (and maybe still do) has come about also. The dough eyed look with guns . . . stop it.
An armorer, in my view, probably ought to look like a grumpy technician who doesn't bother to wash his clothes and who generally holds most of the world in contempt.
And that person shouldn't have youthful Goth photos that can show up in British tabloids.
It's Ain't All Black and White
I saw this post on Reddit about the recent Wyoming Special Legislative Session:
'Angry old white men nearly done wasting limited taxpayer resources to pointlessly yell at clouds . . . again'
To start off with, I've been pretty critical of the Special Session, mostly as it appeared at first that it was going to enact legislation that was Unconstitutional due to the Supremacy Clause through votes that violated the legislators oaths of office. As it was, however, I was pleasantly surprised when the legislature didn't enact something unconstitutional
I'll note, however, that the concept that the legislature unilaterally of its own isolated volition put itself into session is wrong. Governor Gordon got it rolling in the first place when he indicated he was going to do it, and then never acted on it. And the right-wing populist members of the legislature, which turns out to be a minority, was acting in compliance with the views of its constituents, whom are also probably a minority. There's a lesson in that.
But what is really miffing me is the now constant insertion by the Woke of the term "white" into anything they deem lacking. At this point I wouldn't be surprised to see people angry over traffic accidents noting that the drivers were "white".
Not every member of the Wyoming legislature is white. Granted, the minority members are largely Democrats, but there are members of minorities in the legislature. And they aren't all "men" either. Nor are they all old. There's some surprisingly young members, including one of the most populist members, Chuck Gray. Gray is far from old, even if he is a while male. He's a 2012 graduate of the Wharton School of Business, which would mean that he's probably about 31 years old. It's really the older members of the legislature that kept this session from going full bore populist radical.
Moreover, while I've been critical of the American gerontocracy, it proved to be the more seasoned, and therefore older, Republicans in the legislature who really tempered what it was doing, as noted.
I just posted on this elsewhere, but the "white" thing is really becoming a left wing cliché said mostly by white upper middle class dinks and sinks.* Say it often enough and you'll really piss off what amounts just regular folks. "White" doesn't really exist as an ethnicity anyway, and lumping everyone who puts "Caucasian" down on the form at the DMV together in one category is stupid. Beyond that, its racist, inaccurate, and arrogant.
What's also ignorant is assuming that the legislature, whatever you think of it, must be made up of "angry old men" because it must be. The angry men and women in Wyoming politics seem to be younger, FWIW, than older, and they aren't all men.
'Angry old white men nearly done wasting limited taxpayer resources to pointlessly yell at clouds . . . again'
D'uhHarvard professors warn that war-torn countries will miss global vaccine goals in 2022
So reads a headline.
Wars have always been associated with the spread of disease. Why would this one be any different?
Where the capitalist and socialist meet
Bernie Sanders Calls U.S. 'International Embarrassment' for Not Offering New Moms Paid Leave
Paid family leave means that the employer pays for the leave, which means that the cost is passed on to the consumer, as in the American economy we now have, there's not that much slack to absorb such things. So everyone ends up paying for the leave, whether they have children or not.
Bernie might need to actually get a regular job for a while so he knows how these things actually work.
One of the really interesting aspects, by the way, of how these supposedly kind-hearted social welfare programs work is to shift the paying to somebody else while tethering the benefitted person to their work. It's interesting.
Paid family leave is paid for by employers. Basically, what Bernie is doing is walking into offices across the land, opening up the till, and taking some money from it so that somebody can pay for somebody else's "paid family leave". The employer has to make that up, of course, so what he does is raise prices or. . . .lay somebody off. You don't have to give leave, after all, to people who aren't there.
In Bernie's world none of these connections exist as progressives secretly believe that all employers are sitting on giant piles of cash.
Not hardly.
The flip side is also interesting, however. The thought is that this act of kindness at a metaphorical gunpoint means that workers are super happy and now aren't faced with all sorts of difficult struggles. In reality, a lot of female employees would rather be home with their children, but prior economic acts of kindness have wrecked that and they have to be at work. Yes, extraction of cash from their employers by operation of law means they get some time home, but they're going to have to come back, and the net impact of the law is to make that all the more certain.
A better and more just kindness would be to have an economy in which families can be supported by one paycheck, but economic policies of the last few decades have made that pretty much impossible for most families Part of that also would be to really require those responsible for bringing children into the world pay for them.
But, no, we're going down a path here that actually is a socialist one of sorts, but mixed into a capitalist system. We're going to tax everyone so people with newborns can have leave, and then they can drop them off in subsidized, i.e., taxpayer supported, daycare, so we can get women, and for that matter men, who'd rather stay home with their kids back at their desks, darn it.
The big shift.
Somewhat related to this, there's lots of news about inflation, which is very scary, but at the same time there's lots of news that employees aren't coming back to work. Not only that, people are quitting work everywhere. Some are calling it the Great Resignation.
Indeed, this is pretty surprising in lots of ways, as its not the youngest employees doing it. According to the Harvard Business Review:Employees between 30 and 45 years old have had the greatest increase in resignation rates, with an average increase of more than 20% between 2020 and 2021. While turnover is typically highest among younger employees, our study found that over the last year, resignations actually decreased for workers in the 20 to 25 age range (likely due to a combination of their greater financial uncertainty and reduced demand for entry-level workers). Interestingly, resignation rates also fell for those in the 60 to 70 age group, while employees in the 25 to 30 and 45+ age groups experienced slightly higher resignation rates than in 2020 (but not as significant an increase as that of the 30-45 group).
If you work in an office, you're seeing this.
There's something distributist and agrarian in this story somewhere.
Employees between 30 and 45 years old have had the greatest increase in resignation rates, with an average increase of more than 20% between 2020 and 2021. While turnover is typically highest among younger employees, our study found that over the last year, resignations actually decreased for workers in the 20 to 25 age range (likely due to a combination of their greater financial uncertainty and reduced demand for entry-level workers). Interestingly, resignation rates also fell for those in the 60 to 70 age group, while employees in the 25 to 30 and 45+ age groups experienced slightly higher resignation rates than in 2020 (but not as significant an increase as that of the 30-45 group).
Well apparently you really don't know what communism is.
So my wife found out today that if she doesn’t get the jab within the next 2 months she will possibly lose her job. She is 24 weeks pregnant and will definitely not be getting it before delivery. If that’s not communism I don’t know what is #LetsGoBrandon
It must be a legacy of the Cold War or something, but Americans are incredibly free in stating something is "Communist" or "Socialist" if they don't like it. I wouldn't be too surprised if some people claimed hurricanes were Communists.
A vaccine mandate of any kind, public or private, isn't Communist.
Communism is the economic theory advanced by Karl "I'm sitting on my ass in the British Library" Marx. The theory was that everything of every kind ought to be owned by the government, and the government would be run by 19th Century workers, as technology had advanced as far as it was ever going to go and that was the end state of technology. Once the workers had shot everyone who had money, and everything was owned in common, including wives, universal bliss would break out.
Marx was an economic idiot whose family turned into a disaster, but he didn't write much about epidemiology or vaccinations.
Like vaccine mandates or not, they've been around as long as vaccinations have existed. George Washington at some point in the Revolution reversed the policy of the Continental Army and started requiring troops to be vaccinated. . . with live vaccines, as it were, for Small Pox.
So, truly, Wiester doesn't know what Communism is.
This could be reduced to a joke level, but this is now so common it's actually an American social problem. here in Wyoming we hear bitching all the time about "socialism" but we're pretty darned keen on Federal government funding of the roads and airports, which is. . . Socialism. We have a state captive Workers Compensation system also, which is. . gasp. . Socialism.
Truth be known, our free market economy, which isn't purely free market by any means, has always had some elements of socialism in it, none of which have anything whatsoever to do with vaccination mandates. I guess free vaccines could be regarded as a social welfare policy, but not socialism.
Big Bird and Ted Cruz
The popularity of Ted Cruz frankly escapes me, but perhaps that's because I'm cynical to start with, but in the current climate, it's stuff like this that causes certain things to constantly have a certain weird tinge to them.
Cruz was a central figure in the "stolen election" post insurrection episode, so he's also a central character in the movement inside the GOP that is fanning the flames of a lie that's creating to a dangerous erosion in democratic values in the country.
Not that there weren't roots in the left, which is being missed.
Since the 1970s at least the American left promoted rule by the courts, as it couldn't get what it wanted at the ballot box. It was hugely comfortable with that, and in fact became completely acclimated to it. That helped create a conspiratorial atmosphere on the right that the courts were in league with "elitist" elements which were out to recreate society, and frankly there was pretty good evidence that was true.
Disenfranchise one element, and it becomes a dangerous fanciful minded one. If we look back on Russia, for example, leading up to the Revolution and during it, we have to wonder how people were led to believe such moronic slop as dished out by the Bolsheviks. Well, decades of repression by the Imperial household and the Russian elites set them up for it. We're seeing something similar now. That, as addressed here earlier, gave us Trump, and Trump is clearly now anti-democratic, so the irony turns full circle. His supporters don't see it that way, however, as they've learned to regard the left as illegitimate.
The left isn't illegitimate, and it remains democratic, but it has an anti-democratic legacy that it hasn't dealt with and right now it really can't. A person can't worry about having left matches around when the house is on fire. Things are really a mess.
If a person was a mediator over the national psyche, you'd probably send the entire country out for counselling. You'd have to get the right to admit the election wasn't stolen and that Trump is more than a little weird. You'd have to get Republican lead legislatures to quit trying to rig votes, and you'd also have to get the right to admit that it hasn't won the popular vote for the Oval Office in over 20 years, and for a reason.
The left would have to admit that a lot of people in the country are pretty conservative and that it's fallen prey to some deeply weird beliefs itself that are contrary to science. Indeed, both political sides are picking and choosing the science they like and disregarding the science they don't like.
Frankly, the country could use about two more middle oriented political parties.
But people also have to quit listening to really self-serving figures, and I'd put Ted in that category. A friend of mine who knows him and likes him says he's a "nice guy", but I mean come on, picking on Big Bird?
Footnotes
*Double Income No Kids and Single No Kids.
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