It was Alec's Fault

And this has nothing to do with his politics

I’m not trying to pile on the guy. I know he didn’t mean to have an accident with a firearm. Nobody ever does. It’s tragic. But the fact remains that the safe handling of any firearm begins and ends with the person handling it.

It doesn’t matter if he was told it was “cold”. It doesn’t matter if there wasn’t supposed to be live ammo anywhere near it. It doesn’t even matter if it was supposed to be an inoperable weapon. It’s still his fault. And now he has to live with the fact that he killed an innocent mother and wife and injured an innocent man.

Every boy (and most girls) I grew up with learned damn young, if you pick up a firearm you check it. If you point a firearm, you are responsible for whatever comes out of it.

Did you take a shot at a deer on the top of a ridge and miss? Well, you are responsible for where that round lands. Did you grab a pistol real quick out of your bedside drawer and shove it in your briefcase? Well you are responsible for what happens with it. Are you a police officer who carries every day for work or a Green Beret with elite training? Well you are responsible for every discharge of that weapon. Full stop.

I do feel bad for the guy. I feel worse for the woman he killed and her family and the man he shot. But I also feel bad for Alec Baldwin. That has to be a terrible feeling.

Now there are going to be a million Hollywood weirdos wanting to put a million things in place to prevent something like this from happening. But the fact is that if he followed the 3 basic rules of firearm handling that most of us learned as children… nothing like this would ever happen.

1) If you touch it, check its condition for yourself. That means visually verifying if the firearm is loaded (are there rounds in the magazine), chambered (is there a round in the breech), and/or charged (is the hammer cocked)… for those of you in Rio Linda.

2) Keep your sausage off the bang button until you’re ready to shoot. That means keep your grimy fingers off than damn trigger until you have your target in your sights.

3) Don’t let that muzzle cross anything you don’t want to immediately destroy. That does not mean “don’t point it at anyone”. That means don’t allow the hole that the hot fast thing comes out of cross the plane of anything you don’t want to break, bleed, and die.

Granted… in the film industry, that third one isn’t always possible, but that just stands to reason that the first two would be that much more important.

Don’t let that photo of that devastated man be of you… Firearm mistakes are avoidable.

—J