Misfire versus Accidental Discharge of a Loaded Weapon

There is a lot on the media with regard to the firearm incident that occurred on the set of Alec Baldwin's Rust movie. It is very distressing and I am deeply saddened that the Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed and Director Joel Souza was seriously injured.  Also at least two other people were directly involved with the handling of the loaded weapon prior to Mr. Baldwin firing the fatal shot.  That would be the Armorer who was responsible for setting up the weapons and an Assistant Director who obtained the weapon and delivered it to Mr. Baldwin prior to the incident.  A lot of lives will be changed forever.

There is something else about this whole sad incident that disturbs me; the exceptionally poor media reporting of what happened.  I read multiple accounts that all seemed to be parroting the same source and misrepresented a rather serious issue that is highly pertinent to what happened.

In multiple media accounts there was mention about a concern regarding a weapon (possibly the weapon used in the incident) that had "misfired" a couple of times before the fatal shooting.  I read account after account and was puzzled why this was such a big issue.  Why? Because a misfire is a "failure of the weapon to fire when it is SUPPOSED to do so."  A misfire in itself is not dangerous, but how you handle a misfire IS important.  A misfire can be the result of a number of factors.  The trigger and firing pin mechanism may have become jammed and failed to strike the primer, the primer may simply not have been struck hard enough to initiate a fire, or the primer can be faulty and incapable of firing.  

A misfire is first handled by "not doing anything" for at least 60 seconds in the unlikely event that the firing mechanism may "un-jam" and fire late.  So during the 60 seconds you keep the weapon controlled and pointed in a safe direction.  After this a person with adequate experience or qualifications may proceed to unload the weapon and determine the nature of the problem.  This can all be done safely and is not terribly difficult.

So I kept wondering how a gun "misfiring" was pertinent to shooting someone with a live round.  Then I read this...

"New Mexico workplace safety investigators are examining if film industry standards for gun safety were followed during production of “Rust.” The Los Angeles Times, citing two crew members it did not name, reported that five days before the shooting, Baldwin’s stunt double accidentally fired two live rounds after being told the gun didn’t have any ammunition.

"A crew member who was alarmed by the misfires told a unit production manager in a text message, “We’ve now had 3 accidental discharges. This is super unsafe,” according to a copy of the message reviewed by the newspaper. The New York Times also reported that there were at least two earlier accidental gun discharges; it cited three former crew members."

Did you see what the actual safety concern was?  I did.  The concern was not about a gun that "misfires" it was about either two or three "accidental discharges" of a loaded firearm on the set. That's a whole different situation and one the media could not even report correctly when staring a quote right in the face while writing their article, "We’ve now had 3 accidental discharges. This is super unsafe.” 

This ranks up there with CNNs use of the terminology "Full  Semi-Automatic" to describe a mode of weapon use that DOES NOT EXIST.  This is possibly hoping to get viewers to conflate this with fully automatic weapons (i.e., machine guns).  

This absolutely atrocious reporting is why I have little to zero respect for those who would like to consider themselves to be journalists.  

So, what should have been done that might have prevented this.  First, there is no way in the world any live ammunition should have been anywhere on or near the set (i.e., completely banned from the premises).  After the first incident (if the reports are true), the whole set should have been shut down and everyone in the cast and crew should have been handed their heads if they were found to have brought any live ammunition onto the set.  Their career should be over on that day with every director in the industry notified what happened and who was responsible.  Who should have done this?  The Producer.  Second, everyone handling a firearm should have been well trained in how to check and clear a firearm properly.  In this case the Armorer, the Assistant Director, and the cast member handling the gun for the scene (Alec Baldwin).  Third, the very first "accidental discharge" of a weapon should have been immediately reported to authorities for a full investigation.  Who should have done this?  That would be the Producer.

The producer, or in this case producers, would appear to bear a lot of responsibility for mis-operation of the production leading directly to the fatal event.  It is literally their job to be responsible for the production.  The producers are: Allen Cheney, Ryan Donnell Smith and Alec Baldwin.  

What should be done now?  The movie should be shut down with no prospect of a restart.  All investment money that has not been spent should be returned to investors.  All the people involved should be indicted and tried in a court of law.  Then civil lawsuits should be filed for damages by the Director and the family of the Cinematographer. 

Will the courts get it right? Why should this time be any different than the court case involving John Landis and the Twilight Zone movie? By that I mean, probably not.           

Friends and Loneliness

I have debated with myself about releasing this.  Then I started thinking about my previous posting.  After all, there is no indication anyone but me will ever see it.  What am I afraid of?  Maybe someone won't like what I am saying.  So what?  There is a lot of things other people say that I don't like and that hasn't impeded them.  So, here it goes.  

It seems that things are different these days compared to many decades ago.  People don't often have a lot of friends.  They might have one or two and getting together to do things is not very common.  Then 2020 happened and the whole bottom fell out of being personally in touch with ... anyone.  It's been Zoom this, Skype that, Team something else plus working from home so that you don't even have in-person contact with co-workers.  I am retired since 2018 so I didn't even have that the last few years.  Everyone is just a picture and voice coming out of a computer or phone.  

My wife does much better at keeping in touch with remote friends.  She calls them  just to say hello and they call her just to talk about what's going on.  I do good to send a Christmas card once a year.  I am awful about maintaining contact with people over long distances.  It's kind of strange since I am the one whose hobby has been talking to people hundreds and thousands of miles away that I have never met personally.  

What I find with the remote interactions these days is such an artificial environment where I don't feel like I know anyone and I don't feel comfortable with letting anyone actually know me.  The exceptions to this are rare for me.  It doesn't help that the one time in my life that I felt like I had personal friends it all turned out to not be real.  It was all artificial, manipulation and fake.  I wasn't being fake but it seems that everyone else was.  As a result I developed a deep seated distrust of people because the people I trusted I found out were not trustworthy.

 In so many "remote" interactions with people I end up sitting there and saying absolutely nothing.  I listen, watch, and then after a while I just disappear fully convinced that no one ever even notices or cares for that matter.  I know this sounds depressing and it is.  I wish life was different and I think it was different at times in the past.  I am just not optimistic about where we are headed in the future.

 I relate to all the people who, for whatever reason, don't feel like they have ever been able to express who they really are inside.  Me too.  No, I don't have any deep dark secrets, but I think we all hide the parts of us that we don't feel are acceptable to those we are around.  It wears on  you.  You get so caught up in not being you until you finally discover you don't even know who you are anymore.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day and I will start over and try to be my best self once again.

Where I Am With Regard to Religion

I've thought about writing this for a very long time.  It's been years in the making and over that time it has become increasingly something I have thought about.  Here's the short version.  I am no longer religious nor have I been for many years.  This is after growing up as a kind of generic Christian, later becoming a Lutheran, still later being part of a Baptist Church and yet another Baptist Church, Then becoming part of a non-denominational church, and then attending several other churches over a period of a few years. 

By saying I am no longer religious, I mean that I simply no longer believe in a God or gods.  I am not claiming that no God or gods exist, just that I am not convinced that any exists.  God or gods either exist or they don't, I just have not seen evidence that would convince me to the point of being able to convict a God of existing.  Any God.  All this means is that I now have a default lack of belief in something because I have not been convinced that it exists (rational thought process).  In the past I believed because everyone around me believed and I simply thought that they knew something that I just accepted as being true without full examination.  

 Having taken a good hard look at the situation for myself, rather than trusting others, I find no convincing evidence for belief.  When people cite evidence for the Christian God, it generally boils down to something said in the Bible which is a book that people claim "comes from God" without any supporting evidence that this is so.  Then they claim that God exists because of some philosophical reason which was never why they came to believe that a God exists themselves.  The philosophical reason, which is invariably flawed, simply has become the rationalization for the belief that they already had.  The result is a poor attempt to prove that God exists that often starts off by assuming that God exists and trying to show that this makes logical sense (circular reasoning).  

When all else fails what I hear mostly is that you just have to have faith.  As it turns out, faith is just the excuse people use for believing something when they have no evidence that it is true (otherwise they would cite the evidence/reason(s) for their belief).  Faith amounts to gullibility for believing something that is "too good to be true" and has no real supporting evidence for being true.  Faith simply is not a reliable path to truth since you can just as easily believe something that is NOT true by faith as something that IS true.   

I will pause to say the following.  If there really was a God who is maximally powerful, omniscient, and full of grace and truth, I believe such a God would have the power to convince me that he, she, or it actually existed.  Of course there are those who say God won't do that because it violates "free will."  Nonsense.  According the the biblical narrative the Devil himself absolutely would know that God exists and that didn't violate his free will.  Also, the God of the Bible violated a lot of people's free will whenever it suited him.  Knowing that God exists would simply give people a choice based upon knowledge, rather than giving them no choice (believe or go to Hell) based upon lack of knowledge.  

Any God who depends upon only ignorant people believing in him, is not really a God (Excuse me, why does God need a Starship?).  Yes, that is from a Star Trek movie, but it illustrates the problem of not questioning any agent claiming to be a God (a very powerful being was pretending to be God to get what he wanted - out of prison).  

By the way, for what it's worth, I don't believe in Satan/Devil/Lucifer/Baal either. It's just another character in the same mythology.  No I don't worship Zeus either and most likely neither do you for the same reason I gave up on the Christian God (also, not Allah, or anyone else).  

So now everyone who doesn't agree with me is probably thinking I am some immoral person who does terrible things because I am without God to give me moral guidance.  Sorry, but that is laughable once you actually read the Bible (Ex. 21 for example). No, there is NO excuse for the Bible (supposedly from God) telling you HOW to go about acquiring your slaves, how to beat them in an acceptable manner, how to own people as property and leave them to your descendants, and cheat them out of possible freedom.  Oh, but that was in the Old Testament people will say.  Well, guess what, slavery was treated as something completely acceptable in the New Testament as well. This kind of makes sense because the Bible says God is the same yesterday and today.  Yes, God, as described by the Bible, didn't change because a "perfect" God can't change (even if he is perfectly wrong).

Perhaps you get the idea that I am mad at God and "just want to sin."  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I can't be mad at something that does not exist.  That would make about as much sense as being mad at Voldemort from the Harry Potter books.  Also, my sense of morality does not come from a mythological being and instead tells me when that being is acting immorally (commanding murder of men women and children on multiple occasions, drowning the world to fix a problem he created, and playing games with human lives like in Job).  With regard to sin, that's about doing something against God which you can't really do if God doesn't exist.  Regardless, no I don't run around doing evil things.  Quite the opposite in fact.  Am I perfect?  Heck no.  Neither is any religious person I have ever met either.   

Frankly, even if the Christian God proved that he existed, assuming he was exactly as portrayed in the Bible I still would not worship him, her, it.  That God is a travesty.

There, I've had my say and I won't harp on it.  If you have any questions you can let me know, but I doubt that will ever happen.  As I said initially, this is the short version and there is a lot more to say on the subject, but it won't be happening here.  In the mean time I hope you all are recovering from what has been happening for the last year and a half.  This certainly wasn't the way I expected to spend my retirement. 

Random Acts of Kindness

I have hesitated to write this, but what the heck.  No one reads this stuff, do they?  So, I figure here is my chance to say something without anyone knowing. For a while now I have engaged in random acts of kindness.  I am not sure when it started, but I remember some of the earlier ones. 

There is a diner I have gone to periodically over the years.  I call it, "taking myself out to breakfast." I always enjoyed going there, just sitting at the counter instead of at a table, and watching everyone while indulging in a breakfast that I probably really should not have been eating.  It often included pancakes or waffles with a lot of syrup, and sausages (yeah, not supposed to be eating like that).  Anyway, one day as I was eating an older couple came in.  Yes, even older than me.  The wife was doing alright, but the husband was having to use a walker.  I watched them as they came in and were shown to their table just around to corner from where I was sitting and almost out of my sight.  Not that I was trying to do so, but I could not get them out of my mind.  I kept wondering what their life might be like, and realizing that, when you are having to use a walker, a little unexpected "cheering up" might be welcomed.

Somewhere along the line I made a decision.  As I finished my meal I received my check, put a tip on the counter and headed for the cash register.  When I got there I paid for my meal then pointed out the older couple nearby to the clerk at the register.  "You see that couple just around the corner where the guy has the walker?"  The clerk acknowledged that she did.  "Here,"  I said, handing her another $40, "This is for their breakfast too."  She accepted the money, "No change," I said as I turned and walked out.  It made me feel better on the way home to think that the couple would be surprised and maybe just a little bewildered at the mystery of why someone had done such a thing.  

 Since then I have done that and similar things on a number of occasions. I have asked servers for the check of people at the diner. Most recently I was having trouble picking someone.  I had some ideas, but none felt quite right.  Finally just before I left I called the waitress over and asked her, "If you had $40 to give anyone in this restaurant, who would you pick?"  It was a little unexpected, but she knows I have done this, so she started looking around and seriously thinking about it.  Soon she identified a person.  She told me it was a middle school teacher sitting where I could not see her.  "Good, "  I said, handing her $60, "Here is $40 for her and $20 for you."  She was a little surprised by that second part and she thanked me.  Then I went up front, paid for my breakfast and was on my way.

My wife and I both do this sort of thing.  She has bought groceries for people, as have I, and we both try to keep on the lookout for people who just might appreciate a "random act of kindness."  We've also done things that didn't involve any money.  I remember a situation years ago where we had gone to a restaurant for dinner.  As we were waiting we saw an older single woman who was also waiting for a table.  When our name was called and we got our table, we asked the woman if she might like to join us.  I am sure this was unusual for her, but she accepted and we had a nice meal together and had a very pleasant conversation.

I realize these small things may not make a huge difference in someone's life, but I figure sometimes all people need is to know that they are seen, heard and someone cared enough to do something for them that was out of ordinary.  

 I highly recommend doing "random acts of kindness."     

Left, Right, or Middle?

This whole thing about identifying yourself or others as being politically left, right, or middle is becoming increasingly annoying to me.  If you choose to identify yourself in that manner, it is certainly your right to do so, but to me it leads me to believe you don't spend much time doing any critical thinking about things.  I don't find any subject to be simple enough to think there is one simple position to take regarding it.  You name the subject, and I will find some things where I agree with the left, others where I agree with the right, and still others where my position is more closely aligned with those in the middle.  

Does that make me a centrist?  No.  It makes me someone who thinks about topics and is willing to consider all sides, their pros and their cons.  I don't think any political group has any corner on the truth, but what is worse is I think they all spend way too much time actually cornering the market on lies, misrepresentations, mis-characterisations, straw-manning, and ad hominem attacks (attacking the source rather than the issue).  

The other thing I am completely fed up with is judging people's character by one or two words in a Tweet.  First of all, I wouldn't bother to read a Tweet if you went to the trouble to put it in front of me?  Why? because few if any out there can adequately express themselves in 280 characters without inviting vagaries, mis-statements, and poor word choices as they issue things on-the-fly from their phones.  I want to actually understand what people mean to say rather than just what it might appear that they are saying.  I want to have an actual dialog where I can question whether I understand what they are trying to communicate.

I have often said that virtually nothing that is said or written by anyone is completely clear in its meaning except to the speaker or author.  Sometimes it is not even clear to them a few minutes after they have said or written it.  That even happens to me as I find that something I have written could be misunderstood.

Perhaps you may think that what someone has said is "perfectly clear."  That is seldom if ever the truth since the very act of reading something makes it subject to the interpretation of the reader which can itself be flawed or biased.

In the mean time I have decided that whenever anyone makes blanket negative statements about any group of people (race, political, religious, or otherwise), I am going to take that statement personally as if it was said directly to me.  I am going to do my best to walk in their shoes (not possible, but like I said "my best").  I am going to read and listen to those statements as if I was part of that group and deal with my reaction to it.  So if you want to call any group of people crazy, morons, stupid, hicks, genetically challenged, or whatever, you have just said that to my face and I just might not take it kindly.