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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31611 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Uh...isn’t the salient feature that Baldwin shot someone? If he weren’t producing, hiring, etc. I would expect him to face the exact same charge. Maybe the armorer would also have liability, but I doubt it would roll uphill to the producer.

Anyway,

medieval punishment

I find it sort of amusing that you’ve reinvented an anti-death-penalty thought experiment, but followed it in the complete opposite direction. By assigning the maximum possible punishment to this crime, you have defined every other crime as lesser. Now our hypothetical amoral scientists have zero incentives to avoid lesser crimes like rape and murder—or worse ones like knowingly releasing such viruses! This is analogous to replacing all manslaughter offenses with mass murder. How would the incentives to be more careful stack up against those for murderers to be less selective?

It’s also worth considering that people still get sentenced to death, our current endpoint of the punishment scale. Assuming rational actors, they must be valuing their crime as worth an arbitrarily large punishment. What makes you think that amoral scientists wouldn’t make the same judgment even in the face of your choice of punishments?

Allowing for irrational actors, now...At some point, the Big Numbers round off to “very bad thing.” This gets multiplied by the eternal optimism of “this will never happen to me,” yielding an end result of “eh, probably fine.” Maybe the Eliezer Yudkowskys and Sam Bankman-Frieds of the world shut up and multiply correctly. I wouldn’t count on their coming to your same conclusion!

It does appear likely that it is Baldwin's role as the producer that is the basis for the charge. The armorer has also been charged, and the state OSHA fined the production company for violating various firearms safety regulations. The OSHA chief was quoted as saying, "What we had, based on our investigators' findings, was a set of obvious hazards to employees regarding the use of firearms and management's failure to act upon those obvious hazards."

I think the opposite, in that otherwise other producers would have been similarly charged. Especially as Baldwins role as producer did not apparently involve hiring any of the people or overseeing them on set. Given that it would be weird to charge him specifically out of all the producers. Ryan Smith's production company was apparently the one that did that.

I think he was charged because he was the one with the gun in his hand.

Yes, it looks like you are right. The NY Times this am says:

The district attorney for Santa Fe County, Mary Carmack-Altwies, said in an interview that Mr. Baldwin had a duty to ensure the gun and the ammunition were properly checked and that he should never have pointed it at anyone. “You should not point a gun at someone that you’re not willing to shoot,” she said. “That goes to basic safety standards.”

and

“He has an absolute duty to know that what is in the gun that is being placed in his hand is safe.”

And I suppose they might also argue that his knowledge of previous issues on set re guns served to enhance his duty.

Of course, that the DA claims such a duty exists does not mean that the duty does, in fact, exist. The first claim (“You should not point a gun at someone that you’re not willing to shoot,”) is clearly wrong in the special case of a movie production. Movie productions substitute other safety rules for that one, like "No live ammunition should be available" (a rule obviously impractical in other circumstances involving firearms).

That "absolute duty" (the "absolute" would indicate failure was itself proof of negligence -- though still not necessarily criminal negligence) seems unlikely to be supported by NM case law.

They also substituted the safety rule of “say ‘cold gun’ to the talent when you hand over an unloaded weapon” for the well-known safety rule “every gun is always loaded, unless you yourself have checked.” Together, those two substituted rules allowed one bullet onto the set, into the gun, and ultimately through the victim.

The moment anyone on set heard about the accidental discharge two days before, the standard rules should have been reinstated.

Together, those two substituted rules allowed one bullet onto the set, into the gun, and ultimately through the victim.

No; the substituted rules were violated. One rule was "no live ammo on set" and another was "check the ammo before loading it into the gun". Both these were violated, but not by Baldwin. The source of the live ammo remains unclear, but it was the armorer's job to ensure it was not present and to check the ammo before loading it into the gun.

The moment anyone on set heard about the accidental discharge two days before, the standard rules should have been reinstated.

The standard rules for a movie production are the substituted ones. The earlier accidental discharges were of blanks. One was caused when someone slipped while lowering the hammer -- in that particular revolver one must lower the hammer by pulling the trigger and holding the hammer back. Another was apparently caused by dropping a rifle loaded with a blank. Both of these can happen without any rule violations at all, merely unavoidable human fallibility.

Of course not. But we are discussing the DA's rationale for bringing the charges,not whether Baldwin is guilty.

Uh...isn’t the salient feature that Baldwin shot someone?

No. An actor is hired by a production company to perform a role with the tools they are given by the production company. Since most movies do not involve the actual killing of real people with real guns with real ammo, an actor's assumption would be that any firearm they are given to use as a prop during filming is non-lethal, and there is an existing apparatus of firearms-specific prop handlers who are hired by production teams to make sure that when an actor is handed a prop gun it is non-lethal and safe for use in make-believe scenarios. Now, my gun-enthusiast buddies will say that anyone handling a firearm is responsible for what happens with that firearm while they are handling it, but this is the POV of people who live in gun culture and are expecting to be using lethal weapons with live ammo. This is not the case with actors, who are more likely to be gun-ignorant as well as have their head at least half in a state of make-believe. It is the job of the production team to educate the relevant actors on proper gun-handling procedures and ensure the safety of the gun.

Now, that Baldwin was also a producer of this movie puts him farther up the chain of responsibility and liability. As movies often have several producers with different levels of on-set responsibility, if Baldwin as a producer is charged with a crime (criminal negligence seems more apt than manslaughter, in this case), that same should apply to all producers with on-set responsibilities as well as to the property masters and firearms advisors who put a live gun in the hand of an actor (who likely to be the least capable person on the set).

It is the job of the production team to educate the relevant actors on proper gun-handling procedures and ensure the safety of the gun.

Of which, Baldwin, having worked on many movies where guns were used were well aware of.

A big issue in the Baldwin situation is that in the scene that was being shot, Baldwin was meant to be quickly drawing the gun. He was not meant to be firing it. If you look at the filming right before the incident happened, his finger is clearly inside the trigger guard and likely near or on the trigger itself. So the revolver should have never of been fired in the first place. It was his negligence by pulling the trigger. If he was in a scene wherein he was intended to "shoot" the gun, and that is when the negligent discharge happened I would have more empathy towards Baldwin's innocence. This is not the case, so the armorer failed by allowing live ammunition onto the set and Baldwin failed by negligently pulling the trigger of the revolver when the scene did not call for it. Both made critical errors, leading to the death of one and another injured, and both are justifiably going to be charged.

I mean, that's definitely an error, but realistically the armorer made the much bigger mistake. Most rules about gun safety, such as not pointing the gun at anyone, go out the window in movies and are replaced by "make sure the armorer knows what they're doing."

Honestly makes me wonder why they use real guns at all.

This is my question. What is the point? Build a replica without the ability to fire at all. You can with tech make a small fire at the end of the gun and then dub in the relevant sound effect later.

In a movie with a budget of 7 million about cowboys, the cost of special effects as against firing blanks et al may be cost prohibitive.

(criminal negligence seems more apt than manslaughter, in this case)

Criminal negligence resulting in the death of a human being is involuntary manslaughter. Criminal negligence in itself is not a crime; it's a mens rea.

I don't think Baldwin was criminally (or even ordinarily) negligent, given what's known now. The armorer seems to have at least been negligent and probably criminally negligent in not detecting the live round. Merely hiring someone who was negligent isn't negligence, unless Baldwin had some reason to know she would be negligent. This doesn't seem to be the case.

Uh...isn’t the salient feature that Baldwin shot someone? If he weren’t producing, hiring, etc. I would expect him to face the exact same charge. Maybe the armorer would also have liability, but I doubt it would roll uphill to the producer.

Negligent hiring can be a theory of liability, but looks at what the hirer knew or should have known about the candidate at the time of hiring. I'm not up on entertainment industry hiring structures, so don't know if producers are responsible for staffing. But assuming arguendo that they are, if the armorer was unqualified and incompetent, that could theoretically drag the producer into it.

Negligent hiring is a common basis for civil liability, but not for criminal liability. I suppose there might a case out there on criminal liability on that basis, but it would be an enormous stretch. Especially given that criminal negligence is a higher bar to prove than is the ordinary neglidence required to prevail civilly.

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