Unsafe Use of Firearms On- and Off-set in Hollywood

One evening on the set of "The Crow", the production's firearms expert had gone for the day; so the prop master tried to unload a .44 Magnum revolver that had just been used in a scene. The prop master accidentally fired a lightly loaded "dummy" cartridge. A dummy cartridge should have no gunpowder in it. But this one actually had just enough powder to separate the bullet from its casing so that it became stuck in the barrel. (This is called a squib.) The next day, 31 March 1993, someone, possibly the arms master (if so, he should have known better), loaded blanks into the same handgun without checking to see whether anything was amiss. When one actor pointed the gun at another and fired at a distance of no less than twelve feet, the exploding gunpowder from the blank sent the bullet, which should not have been there, into the abdomen of actor Brandon Lee, 28. He was pronounced dead that afternoon after surgeons were unable to save him. Lee's fiancee, Eliza Hutton, became an advocate for stricter gun safety on movie sets.

On 21 October 2021 cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed in a firearms accident on the set of the Western "Rust", which was being filmed near Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Actor Alec Baldwin fired a prop gun loaded with blanks, which killed Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza.

The mechanism of the shooting accident has been described as a "misfire", which could cover several possible mistakes or mechanical failures. An assistant director handed Baldwin one of three guns from a tray, telling the actor that the gun was "cold", meaning safe.

According to Baldwin, he cocked the hammer of the firearm with his thumb and then, when instructed to do so by Hutchins, let the hammer go so that it fell--as it turned out--onto a live round in the firing chamber. This is why Baldwin can say that he "never pulled the trigger". Revolvers of the type used here can be fired by directly manipulating the hammer without engaging the trigger, which only works because it also controls the hammer.

Some in the film industry quickly commented that real firearms with blanks should be banned and replaced with replicas. Gunfire and muzzle flashes should be added using special effects. Director Craig Zobel said that he has already done this on the HBO series "Mare of Easttown" where the gunshots "are all digital. You can probably tell, but who cares? It's an unnecessary risk." Alexi Hawley, executive producer of the ABC TV series "The Rookie", ordered that there "will be no more 'live' weapons on the show." Bill Dill, a cinematographer who knew Hutchins, wondered aloud why we still have the "archaic practice of using real guns with blanks in them when we have readily available and inexpensive computer graphics".

Articles about the Hutchins shooting suggest that there exist "rules and regulations" about on-set gun safety, despite which people are still liable to be killed (fortunately, not very often, considering the large number of shoot-'em-ups made in recent years). After the on-set shooting of Brandon Lee in 1993, one reform advocated was that absolutely no one but the firearms master should control firearms on the set. (The general prop master had mishandled the revolver used in the Lee shooting.) News reports suggest that this safety rule was not followed in the Hutchins case. Crew members say that other firearms mishaps preceded the fatal shooting.

Hawley proposed the use of pellet guns but did not say whether he meant for them to be fired. Anything that shoots a projectile could potentially hurt or even kill someone accidentally. (The late Navy SEAL, Adam Brown, was blinded in one eye by a supposedly "safe bullet" used in a training exercise. Brown was even wearing safety glasses, but the pellet managed to find its way behind the lens.)

This adventure series starred Jennifer O'Neill and Jon-Erik Hexum. Hexum, who played a character who was supposed to be an expert with firearms, wasn't really. Off-camera, he accidentally shot himself in the head while playing Russian roulette with a .44 Magnum handgun that contained blanks. He did not know that, if you put the muzzle of a gun containing blanks directly against your body and pull the trigger, it can hurt you. In this case, the charge from the gun caused a head injury that led to Hexum being declared brain dead.

Let's start with one of the most egregious examples of unsafe firearms use within the plot of a movie. In 'Pulp Fiction', hit man Vincent Vega (John Travolta) has his pistol in his hand for no particular reason while riding in the front passenger seat of an automobile. He is arguing with Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), the driver, and wants the opinion of Marvin (Phil LaMarr), the man sitting in the back seat. He turns around to look at Marvin, bringing his pistol around with him and mindlessly pointing it at Marvin. The gun goes off, killing Marvin and leaving Jules and Vincent with a fresh crime to cover up. Vincent has thus shown carelessness with a tool of his profession. He later shows fatal carelessness when he leaves a machine gun on a kitchen counter while he goes to use the facilities.

This might seem more like something stupid than unsafe, although, if you think about it, it is definitely unsafe. In at least one episode of this series, Det. Frank Arcaro (Harry Bellaver) is involved in a shoot out in which he keeps "throwing" his revolver with each shot, as if swinging the gun from an up position to a more or less level position might help throw the bullet out of the gun. Any waving around of a gun is careless and unsafe, not to say stupid in view of the physics of firing a gun: bullets speed out of the barrel so fast, you cannot add to the velocity much by moving the gun. The only thing that will do is reduce your accuracy and increase the likelihood that you will hit something (or somebody) you don't want to. This kind of goof appears in other cops-and-robbers series, such as 'Peter Gunn', as well as in Westerns from the 1950s and early 1960s (i.e., "Silver Lode" 1954). By the 1970s, I think, you see fewer instances of this particular goof.

Another example of unsafe gun-handling was, um, handled better in the episode 'The Day the Island Almost Sank'. Det. Arcaro this time is questioning a witness who suddenly points a pistol at him. Arcaro is understandably unnerved, and not mollified when the man laughs it off by saying that the gun isn't loaded. Arcaro goes from thinking of the man as a witness to seriously considering him a suspect.

In the episode 'Homecoming' (S 3:E5), Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) handles a rifle while arguing with Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter). More than once Buffy idly points the rifle in Cordelia's direction, potentially ending the rivalry with her social nemesis.

The poster says it all. Not the most dangerous handling of a gun ever, but, even though the pistol is probably a prop gun and Chris O'Donnell does not have his finger on the trigger and the muzzle is pointing up into the air, this pose displays disrespect for the potential danger posed by any gun. The fact that a gun is 'only a prop' is not an excuse to be careless with it. (See items number 3 and 13 in this list.) Up in the air is often not a safe direction to point a gun. After all, what goes up, must come down. Also, imagine what would happen to the eardrums of O'Donnell and LL Cool J if the pistol went off as the picture was taken.

Addendum: 30/04/2017 I just checked in and noticed that the poster has been changed so that the gun that was once in O'Donnell's hand has been cropped out. (Or was the picture re-shot?) No longer a violation.

In the episode 'The Vigilante', Barney Miller (Hal Linden) takes a handgun away from a local vigilante. He does not handle it too safely himself, but then Inspector Frank Luger (James Gregory), who on the show is supposed to be an idiot, takes the gun from Miller and proceeds to point it at everyone, including Miller, the vigilante and even himself. The gun was a lot safer in the hands of the vigilante.

James Bond (Sean Connery) carelessly points his pistol at his love interest Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) who understandably turns it away with her hand and tells him guns upset her. (It upsets a lot of people when somebody points a gun at them.) Later in the movie, Kerim Bey (Pedro Armendáriz), Bond's ally, carelessly points a pistol at Bond, who does not get upset about it. He should.

Honorable Mention for a Mistake That is Not a Mistake: In preparing for a robbery, George Peatty (Elisha Cook Jr.) works the slide on his semiautomatic pistol and then inserts the magazine. Some have supposed that he's made a mistake because, if he wanted to be ready to shoot at a moment's notice, then he should have worked the slide AFTER inserting the magazine, because that would have loaded a round into the firing chamber. But Peatty doesn't plan to use the pistol until several hours later, and he probably has decided not to walk around all day carrying a pistol in his pants with a bullet in the chamber. Having worked the slide before inserting the magazine, he's insured that any round that might previously have been left in the firing chamber has been ejected. Now he knows that the pistol won't fire unless he works the slide again. Chances are, his gun would not have gone off accidentally even with a round in the chamber, but since he is the one carrying it, it is his prerogative and his peace of mind that counts.

A classic but not unrealistic scene involves two young men who have 'borrowed' a car and find a pistol in the glove box. One announces he has never seen a gun before, except in the movies, and points it at his friend, who pushes it away and tells him not to point guns at people. A good lesson. There are guns in the world, and people who have never seen one before don't know how to behave when they do see one.

Finding unsafe firearms practices in TV and movies is like, well, shooting fish in a barrel, but take, for example, an episode of this series about private eyes Honey (Anne Francis) and Sam (John Ericson). It is an episode entitled 'A Million Bucks in Anybody's Language' in which several safety violations take place in just one scene. One instance is a twofer: Sam is holding two bad guys at gun point. Honey is going to call the police, so she walks between Sam and the bad guys to reach the telephone. This creates two problems, the first being that Honey walks in front of the business end of a gun, exposing her to the danger of being shot accidently; the second problem is that she blocks Sam's view of the bad guys that he is trying to keep in check until the police come. Sure enough, one of the baddies pushes Honey into Sam, knocking him over, and a fight that could have been avoided ensues. Of course, the writer and/or director wanted a fight scene, but to any viewer who was paying attention, the series just made its lead characters (and Honey in particular) look like idiots. (Surprisingly, when Honey and Sam hand each other the gun to take turns watching the crooks, they are laudably careful about it.)

In 'A Stitch in Crime', Honey and Sam are standing outside the villains' lair, and Honey holds a revolver that she keeps pointing at her partner. In the sixties, most cops and private eyes on TV thought nothing of keeping their fingers on the trigger, as does Honey here (and in the title sequence to each episode). Nowadays you are more likely to see the trigger finger of TV detectives lying alongside the trigger guard rather than inside it on the trigger itself. While this is good firearms protocol when not ready to shoot, current actors tend to do this even when they are under a threat and ought to be more prepared to pull the trigger. Honey West, on the other hand, keeps her finger on the trigger, but then, when push comes to shove, she lets a bad guy take the gun away from her rather than being mentally prepared to shoot. There is gun safety when you do not want to shoot your partner, and then there is pure safety when you had better shoot the bad guy before he takes your gun away from you and kills you with it. Honey did the wrong thing in each situation.

Whereas in the '60s characters tended to put their fingers on the trigger too often, as when they should not have wanted to shoot their friends accidentally, in recent years, they are safety conscious to the point of not having their fingers on their triggers even when they are facing an armed opponent. In several episodes of this series, particularly one titled 'Fall of Man', even the bad guy practices this kind of gun safety! In Episode 2.2, 'Eye of the Hurricane', Harlee (Jennifer Lopez) puts a gun to Woz's (Ray Liotta) head. As the camera jumps back and forth between angles, Harlee sometimes has her finger on the trigger and sometimes doesn't. This is a tough call. Do you go for authenticity or on-set safety? In this case, it would seem that they went for both but got neither.

This is a movie about criminals who are always pointing guns at each other whether they mean to shoot or not. The message that these are dangerous characters is implicit in the story and is underscored by their carelessness with the tools of their trade. Most egregious, however, is the scene near the end where the character Tommy G (Liam Waite) shouts "I'm not crazy!" while touching the muzzle of his pistol to his own skull in order to make his point. No, Tommy, there is nothing wrong in there at all.

In several episodes, characters wander in the woods with hunting rifles. One or two actors point their guns in a safe direction, but most do not. Nobody says, "Watch where you're pointing that thing!" But somebody should.

Kudos to Barnabas Collins (actually, the actor who plays him, Jonathan Frid) for handling a rifle properly in episode 585, keeping the muzzle away from Julia (Grayson Hall) and only pointing it at Adam (Robert Rodan), the person he considers a threat.

Collinwood, the mansion where the main characters live, has many kinds of weapons in unlocked drawers and just hanging on the walls for decoration, even though there is a curious and troubled nine-year-old boy living in the house.

The characters eventually time-travel to other eras. In episodes 453 and 455, in particular, there is some violence involving a flintlock pistol in 1795. Peter Bradford (Roger Davis) idly points the pistol at the abdomen of Victoria Winters (Alexandra Moltke Isles), whom he supposedly loves. Subsequently, Victoria unintentionally points the gun at ten-year-old Daniel Collins (David Henesy). Repeatedly.

Later, in the same episode, Victoria shoots Noah Gifford (Craig Slocum) as he attempts to strangle Daniel, but since Noah is holding Daniel close, there is no guarantee that Victoria won't shoot Daniel, too, at a distance of perhaps more than ten feet. Victoria does the right thing by giving Noah a verbal warning, but, not being an expert marksman, she probably should have fired at a somewhat closer range.

In episode 547, Julia (Grayson Hall) goes to the great house to shoot someone with a revolver. Barnabas (Jonathan Frid) goes along to talk her out of it. Julia fondles the gun as if it were a puppy, and, though her finger isn't on the trigger, she keeps it pointed at Barnabas. (I know Barnabas is supposed to be a vampire but 1) at this point in the saga he is temporarily cured of vampirism, so he could be killed; 2) an actor should never point even a prop gun [see "Cover Up" and "The Crow" above] at someone unless they have been instructed that it's time to do the stunt, and the firearms expert on the set has OKed it.) Barnabas keeps saying, "Give me the gun, Julia." She is about to give it to him - one bullet at a time.

Otherwise quirky fun is distressingly marred by an early scene in which Doc (Christopher Walken) loads a magazine into his pistol, which he holds so that the muzzle is no more than an inch from his groin. If the gun were to discharge, it looks like a potential direct hit to the place where the left leg joins the pelvis.

My knowledge of anatomy is not what it could be, but I suspect that there are some major vessels at that location, which carry blood to and from the legs. This is why it is very ignorant to suggest that someone would cause less harm if they shot someone in the leg rather than the chest; while a shot to the chest can certainly be deadly, shooting someone in a major vessel of the leg could potentially lead to death by exsanguination in two minutes or less.

To paraphrase Martin Sheen's character in "Apocalypse Now", critiquing unsafe gun practices in a movie like "Destroyer" is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indianapolis 500.

Even granting that Nicole Kidman's character, LAPD Det. Erin Bell, is out-of-control and generally a danger to herself and anyone who gets close to her, it is still cringeworthy to see her enter the scene of a bank-robbery-in-progress with a fully automatic rifle (an H&K MP 5, I believe) - set on fully automatic - and start shooting at the bank robbers.

There are two (at least) reasons why a responsible police officer would not do that. (You see why I stipulated that Detective Bell is obviously not a responsible law enforcement officer.)

Number one is that the bank is full of innocent civilians who just came in to do some business, not to become collateral damage. Fully automatic fire (pull the trigger, and bullets come out of the muzzle continuously until you either take your finger off the trigger or run out of ammunition) puts out more bullets than you need to hit your target. The extra bullets increase the chance that you'll hit something or somebody you really don't want to hit.

Fully automatic rifles usually have a switch so that you can turn the rifle into a semi-automatic, meaning that it will only fire one bullet each time you pull the trigger. To get it to fire another bullet, you have to pull the trigger again.

The second reason to set a rifle capable of fully automatic fire on semi-auto is that it saves ammunition. Of course, Detective Bell is so over-the-edge that she does not care if there is a tomorrow when the bill will come due for all of the ammunition she expends, but at the rate she is expending bullets, she might run out in a single scene. (She does carry two magazines, which are bullet storage devices, and she is seen to reload at least once, which means she uses both magazines - so, conservatively, maybe she uses between 30 and 60 bullets in one brief scene?)

Most soldiers and police, when carrying rifles capable of fully automatic fire, set them on semi-automatic for the two reasons stated above: safety and economy.

In the first episode, LAPD Officer John Nolan is conferring with two FBI agents when they notice a group of men who have suddenly produced rifles that look to be either automatic or semi-automatic.

Nolan calls for back up, which is understandable given California's many firearm restrictions, especially within city limits. (Even remembering that this is Los Angeles, aka, Hollywood; and it would not be the first time that police mistook filmmakers shooting an action-crime movie for real-life criminals.)

The question of whether the rifles are automatic or semi-automatic is soon answered when the police approach the men, who open fire with what is definitely automatic fire—i.e., machinegun fire. (See my entry on "The Practice" for a discussion of automatics versus semi-automatics.)

If the show has an FBI consultant, I do not think they did their job (or were not allowed to do it?) which ought to be to give sound advice about the kind of safe and prudent tactics ordinarily used by real FBI agents:

At the end of the episode, the FBI agents, armed with nothing but semi-automatic pistols, again go up against the same gang of criminals who are still armed with fully automatic rifles. The problem here has less to do with automatic versus semi-automatic as with rifles versus pistols. In general, rifles have more power and accuracy at longer range than pistols do. If you have to go up against a “long gun”, you want to have a long gun of your own, not a relatively shorter pistol. (The parent series, "The Rookie", seemed to understand this principle in some of its episodes.) Besides, it would be standard procedure for FBI agents, knowing ahead of time that they are about to confront a number of criminals armed with rifles, to call for back up from an FBI special weapons and tactics (SWAT) unit. These units have long guns as well as other specialized weapons and equipment that would be useful in apprehending (and neutralizing if necessary) a group of well-armed felons. These SWAT units are also stationed all over the United States and can be deployed rapidly anywhere in a short time.

Not calling in a SWAT unit in this scenario seems not just dangerous but negligent. It seems implausible that a unit of FBI agents would go into such a situation without heavily-armed back up. Indeed, the real FBI has recently been accused of overusing SWAT units in apprehending suspects, not underusing them as seems to be the case here.

Misinformation can be a safety issue. I would argue—perhaps against the grain of much public discourse these days—that facts should matter most of all to those trying to persuade the public to change policies. If their facts are wrong, they will undermine their own argument. Not only that, but they'll fail to understand why their arguments are likely to cause their opponents to dig their heels in all the more.

"The Practice" is a good show for the most part, but in "Target Practice" (S3 E17) the lawyers sue a gun manufacturer for providing the guns used in a drive-by shooting. Setting aside the credibility of the complaint that the manufacturer violated federal laws (why, then, is this case being handled as a lawsuit instead of the federal government prosecuting the company for breaking laws?), what seemed troubling to me was the plaintiff's "expert witness" describing the murder weapon as "a semi-automatic" and in the next breath saying that it "sprays bullets".

What if anything is wrong with that pair of statements? Simplistically speaking, automatic firearms could be called machineguns—you pull the trigger and hold it, and bullets might be said to “spray” out of the muzzle of the gun until you either take your finger off of the trigger or the gun’s magazine runs out of ammunition. With a semi-automatic firearm, on the other hand, only one bullet comes out of its magazine each separate time that the trigger is pulled. If you hold the trigger, nothing further happens; you have to let go and pull the trigger again to make the next bullet fire. A semi-automatic firearm shoots bullets one at a time. The bullets cannot be said to “spray” from a semi-automatic in the same sense that they do from an automatic firearm.

During the twentieth century, semi-automatic rifles and pistols gradually became more common than most other types of rifles and handguns, although shotguns do remain popular. Today, the majority of privately owned firearms in the United States are probably semi-automatics. Outlawing them would mean directly stepping on the toes of the overwhelming majority of U.S. gun owners, which is especially counterproductive if what one really wants to do is to ban genuine assault rifles rather than guns that cosmetically look like automatic assault rifles.

But here is the trouble with banning fully automatic firearms: They are already banned. They are federally regulated and have been since the 1930s. In order to legally own a fully automatic firearm in the U.S., one has to register the weapon with the federal government and pay for an expensive license. This tends to restrict legal ownership of these weapons to relatively well-to-do gun collectors. There might arguably be a problem with enforcement of these regulations because some gangs do buy automatic firearms illegally. Automatics are stolen, smuggled, and sold to other criminals. This is what the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) is paid to deal with.

The point here is that misinformation and, frankly, ignorance can only hurt the cause which the makers of "The Practice" no doubt would advocate, not to mention the fictional lawyers' clients. All it would take is for one juror to say, "That so-called expert witness does not know what he is talking about", to torpedo the plaintiffs' case.

It's the same problem I have with the "Barney Miller" episode that I cite on this list: The character Dutch Schnell (Vincent Gardenia) takes a loaded revolver from Piney Woods' (Tom Ligon) holster and confiscates it, but since Dutch proceeds to point the gun at Piney and several others (and keeps his finger on the trigger the entire time), Dutch endangers more people than he protects. If he felt he had to confiscate the gun, it would have been far safer if he had confiscated the holster along with the gun, never actually touching the weapon.