Alec Baldwin calls for police officers to be on movie and TV sets with guns after "Rust" shooting
Actor Alec Baldwin on Monday called for production companies to hire police officers to monitor the safety of any gun used on movie and television sets. The "Rust" actor and producer fired a .45-caliber revolver while rehearsing a scene for the Western in New Mexico last month, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza.
"Every film/TV set that uses guns, fake or otherwise, should have a police officer on set, hired by the production, to specifically monitor weapons safety," Baldwin tweeted to his followers. The actor recently changed his Twitter account so only users who follow him can read his tweets.
Late last month, Baldwin told paparazzi in Vermont he was "extremely interested" in the effort to limit the use of guns on sets and that he had been told by authorities not to speak publicly about what happened during the October 21 shooting. Last week, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson announced real guns would no longer be used on sets for his movies.
The Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office is investigating the "Rust" shooting, and the district attorney said she hasn't ruled out filing charges in the case. Sheriff Adan Mendoza said during a press conference last month he thought there was "some complacency" on the set.
Mendoza said the bullet extracted from Souza was a live round and approximately 500 rounds of ammunition, including blanks, dummy rounds and other suspected live rounds, were found on the "Rust" set and sent to an FBI lab for analysis. An attorney for the movie's armorer, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, said in a statement last week she inspected the rounds in the gun Baldwin fired before assistant director Dave Halls handed it to the actor on set.
"No one could have anticipated or thought that someone would introduce live rounds into this set," Reed's attorney Jason Bowles said in the statement.