Firearms and Leadership

 Here's a comment that I did for a Youtube video about the Alec Baldwin firearm death:

Thank you KB32 for showing us how to check a revolver just like the one Alec Baldwin is alleged to have misused. Hollywood has lots to answer for. The Wallechinsky family documented decades ago how the place runs on money, power and exploitative sex. And you are right that Hollywood is the home of gun porn (which bears the same relationship to real life firearm use that commercial porn does to real life sex). Hollywood uses firearms and weapons so much that people who work in props - just the guys in the shop - have to take a firearms course. Props people here in Vancouver have a rule: never hand an actor anything - anything - that they can mis-handle. Because they always do.

If you hand them a sword, someone has to make that sword duller than a toddler's dinner knife. If you hand them a fire extinguisher, a prop person has to take the extinguisher and discharge it first. If you hand them some ridiculous "combat" knife, that knife has to be a replica cast in some polymer, not real metal. Everybody knows this.

My brother, an old carpenter who still has all his fingers, explained how safety works. "You make furniture in steps. You have to do everything to spec or at the end all your errors will add up and you will have a problem. Safety is like that: each step has to be done right, because each step protects people if one of the other steps goes wrong." So a series of things had to go wrong on set - a bunch of people had to screw up. (That's what The Guardian, a lefty news source, details here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/23/rust-shooting-alec-baldwin-companies)

And when a series of people screw up - as you know from your time in uniform - that's a leadership problem. To me, Baldwin's fundamental mistake was not creating a culture on the film where people are encouraged to correct each other in a supportive manner. For your audience, I recommend reading astronaut and Navy test pilot Chris Hadfield, a guy who knows about risk and danger. If Baldwin goes to prison maybe he'll have time to read about leadership in Hadfield's book, "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth". Or maybe Bob Sutton's book on business leadership, "The No Asshole Rule". ***


Header picture: TP-82 cosmonaut survival pistol



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