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Rafe wrote: ↑Tue Jan 31, 2023 7:12 pm Prediction: The young armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, will be offered and will accept a plea deal. The DA will go after Baldwin not just as a negligent trigger-puller, but also over his responsibilities as producer of the film; e.g., that his negligence extends to hiring unqualified people, doing extreme corner-cutting, and ignoring safety and other issues that led some crew members to walk off the set. The DA will do this to put Baldwin into two boxes that he has to get out of, not just one (and maybe because the "reckless disregard" card will be easier to play as compounded by his role as producer). Then the assistant director, Hall, who's already taken a plea and the armorer will be called as witnesses for the prosecution in Baldwin's trial. This, of course, assuming Baldwin himself doesn't cop a plea and wants to continue professing his complete and halo-wearing innocence, like he did in the Stephanopoulos interview.

All in all, I think the DA probably knew well what she was doing, and knew she couldn't move forward with such a high-profile case until she had the cards she needed in her poker hand. Baldwin may get off with a deal and not serve actual jail time, but one way or the other he will come away from this adjudged as guilty of something. And damage to a career couldn't happen to a bigger...er, uh, anatomical feature.

In the scene preceding the fatal scene, the gun was loaded with improperly-made dummy rounds, cartridges from which the special-effects crew had removed the powder charges, so in close-ups the revolver would show normal-looking bullets. However, the crew neglected to remove the primers from the cartridges. At some point before the fatal event, one of the rounds had been fired; although there was no powder charge, the energy from the fired primer was enough to push the bullet into the gun barrel, where it got stuck (a condition known as a squib load). For the fatal scene, which called for the revolver to be fired at Lee from a distance of 3.6–4.5 meters (12–15 ft), the dummy cartridges were replaced with blank rounds, which contained a powder charge and primer, but no bullet, allowing the gun to be fired without the risk of an actual projectile. When the blank round was fired, the bullet lodged in the barrel was propelled forward with almost the same force as if the round were live, and it struck Lee in the abdomen.