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An architect designs a bridge. The materials include a number of steel beams that dont actually meet the support requirements for the bridge's expected traffic. The bridge collapses.
This guy, to the survivors of the collapse: Have you ever even taken a bridge safety course?
This analogy is flawed. The engineer would be a gunsmith. The bridge collapsing would be the gun catastrophically failing. A bridge is not deliberately designed to inflict damage on animals (mostly humans) the way a gun is.
I wasn't aiming at crafting the perfect analogy. I wanted to capture the absurdity and fucking asininity of the responders comment.
The point is that it's not up to either the bridge's users (the actors in the film) to "take a safety course" - it's up to the bridge designers/builders (the film set's armorer if we're talking about direct blame or the executive film staff if were talking about corner cutting or poor funding) to make sure the bridge (the prop gun) is safe to use.
If Baldwin is culpable for corner cutting as an executive staff member (and for example, hiring a shitty armorer to save on costs), so be it. I don't give a shit about him. But being mad at someone for not checking a gun when the responsibility lies on a hired expert and this is just how Hollywood operates and in a century of filmmaking there have been a handful of freak accidents?
That’s pretty much what this sounds like to me.
Here's a more applicable example.
Two carnival clowns are having a faux sword fight. One clown hits the other clown, only to find out that his sword is razor sharp. The second clown is impaled and dies.
Do you think we would give the clown the benefit of the doubt?
Is there a clown armorer in the clown troupe who was supposed to diligently do his job and check that the swords are fake?
I'm not against making the clowns take a class about pressing their thumbs to the blade or trying to slice a piece of paper in half (checking that the bullets in the gun are crimped and, therefore, blank), but if the clown industry's SOP is to always have a clown armorer on staff and one of the clown armorer's main jobs is to make sure that all the swords are plastic, then who's to blame here? Who even stored a real metal sword with the fake plastic clown swords? This is a massive failure in clown procedure.
All of what you said can be true and yet, we would probably convict the clown anyway. The clown is poor, "stupid", and disposable. Alec Baldwin is protected by his class, wealth, and fame. There are two standards of justice here and Baldwin will be given the benefit of the doubt because of his power.
I'm not so sure we'd convict the clown - but I also wouldn't argue that the wealthy and famous don't have their own lane when it comes to legal matters. Even if we didn't convict the clown, Baldwin's own road to vindication and absolution would be much, much easier.
And for the record: I don't care about him in the slightest. If he got life in prison over this, all I'd care about is whether it was a just verdict and sentence.
I agree. I don't know for sure if we'd convict the clown. I also don't care about Baldwin. And finally, I also think his privilege protects him.