The Rust Movie Set and The Death of Halyna Hutchins
Horrific gun accidents happen in this country every day, 365 days a year. Halyna Hutchins’ accidental death today on a New Mexico movie set should prompt a larger discussion about regulating guns for safety and about the level of gun safety training necessary to prevent relentless tragedy and trauma.
Shockingly, at present, the gun industry is the only manufacturer of a consumer product in the United States that is fully exempt from federal health and safety regulation. Compounding this, gun accident victims are almost always legally precluded by the PLCAA from suing a gun manufacturer for designing weapons that lack basic safety features like an external manual safety or a loaded chamber indicator. While the law purports to allow such suits, an exception exists under which any criminal prosecution (including for negligence and including juvenile prosecutions) must be treated as the sole cause of a gun accident. This fallacy precludes almost all manufacturing and design defect lawsuits. Here, it appears, quite reasonably, that an assistant director will be charged in connection with Hutchins’ death, but that prosecution will prevent, among other things, any claim of Hutchins’ family that the gun should have been equipped with safety features such as a loaded chamber indicator.
At present, under most state’s laws, new gun owners can get licenses and/or buy their first gun without ever having held one. Accidents that involve untrained shooters are bound to follow.
Notably, the shooter, Alec Baldwin, while also a victim of this tragedy, should have had sufficient safety training to know the importance of personally checking the chamber of the gun for ammunition before pulling the trigger … as well as to know all of the reasons not to point a gun, even if he believed it to be unloaded, at a person or persons. (Similarly, even minimal training would have taught him the visual difference between a blank round and a cartridge with a bullet.)
Finally, Hollywood has long encouraged Americans to fetishize guns and gun-related behaviors without itself suffering any of the consequences of rampant gun violence. The movie industry should rethink not just gun safety on the set, but also ways in which movies foster unsafe and violent behavior.