Hollywood actor Alec Baldwin has long maintained his innocence regarding the fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins on the set of “Rust,” choosing instead to blame everybody around him for the accident. But a new interview with CNN still leaves one question remaining: Why didn’t Baldwin just check the gun himself before handling it?
On Friday, CNN reported that Baldwin pinned the blame for Hutchins’ death last October on two of his colleagues. According to the Left-leaning movie star, the fault for the tragedy really lies with the movie’s armorer and props assistant, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, as well as assistant director Dave Halls.
“Someone put a live bullet in the gun who should have known better,” Baldwin told CNN. “That was [Gutierrez Reed’s] job. Her job was to look at the ammunition and put in the dummy round or the blank round, and there wasn’t supposed to be any live rounds on the set.”
“There are two people who didn’t do what they were supposed to do,” he alleged. “I’m not sitting there saying I want them to, you know, go to prison, or I want their lives to be hell. I don’t want that, but I want everybody to know that those are the two people that are responsible for what happened.”
In the interview, Baldwin pondered aloud why his two colleagues failed to take more precautions with the firearm.
“Why didn’t [Gutierrez Reed] check that bullet? Why didn’t Halls obey her?” Baldwin continued. “Why did he give me the gun? Why didn’t he check? Why did he tell the crew [it was a cold gun]?”
In a statement given to CNN, Gutierrez Reed’s attorney said, “We disagree with Mr. Baldwin’s attempts to deflect blame onto others. It is not for him to decide or to apportion blame.”
Halls’ attorney also told the outlet, “Baldwin is pointing the finger at others because the evidence is pointing at him.”
“Halls is not responsible. Everyone needs to stop. People are only pointing the finger at Halls because they don’t want the responsibility of being wrong. Halls is a scapegoat. People need to look at the evidence,” the assistant director’s attorney added.
Regardless of how a live bullet wound up in the gun, the better question is how come Baldwin failed to check the gun himself before handling the weapon?
It is basic firearm safety to know that you always check the weapon you are handling to see if it contains any live bullets prior to wielding it around.
It does not appear that thought has ever crossed Baldwin’s mind.
He told CNN that he is “pretty confident neither one of them should ever work in a film set again,” regarding his theories about Gutierrez Reed and Halls.
He also appealed to his faith as evidence that he is actually quite merciful in his stance — in his mind anyway.
“I mean maybe it’s the Catholic in me. I have an impulse to say, I don’t want to see anybody suffer,” Baldwin said of Gutteriez Reed. “I don’t want to sit there and say you know, go get her and condemn her.”
To his credit, Baldwin also said, “That she died, that’s the worst thing of all. Somebody died, and it was avoidable. It was so unnecessary.”
“Every day of my life I think about that,” he added while reflecting on Hutchins.
Yet, Baldwin also views himself as a victim. According to the actor, the entire ordeal has “taken years” off his life. He also claimed that his career has suffered from this and would have quit movies all together if not for his wife.
“If I didn’t have my wife, I don’t know where I would be right now,” he said. “If I didn’t have her, I probably would have quit, retired, gone off, you know sold everything I owned, got a house in the middle of nowhere and just you know did find something else to do, sell real estate.”
Earlier in the week, Baldwin also suggested that the media was somehow to blame for the questions that continued to swirl about the shooting and the investigation that followed.
In reaction to those comments, Marine veteran Joey Jones blasted the actor’s lack of personal accountability.
“The way he is handling this is just absolutely disgusting,” Jones said on Fox News. “Number one, if he never pulled the trigger, he’d be saying that from the moment it happened, you’d think, it was six weeks later when he came up with that idea to avoid or circumvent responsibility.”
“I don’t think he is a cold-blooded murderer, but he did something irresponsible and somebody died from it,” Jones added. “Whatever the law says those consequences are, he needs to be held to it.”
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Source: Dailywire
