Lights, camera… action! Alec Baldwin, dressed up like a western gunman, stands up while drawing a pistol, points it in the direction of cinematographer Hutchins, pulls the trigger, and Boom! down she went.

The person in charge of loading movie guns with blanks or dummy rounds is known as the Armorer. The company had hired a young girl, Hannah Gutierrez, as their Armorer. She obviously fumbled badly on the job: but so did several other people. In order for an event like this to be possible, several people all needed to fumble. Said differently, any single person in this chain of custody could have intercepted the live round and the homicide would not have occurred.

Hannah is being tried for involuntary manslaughter, in New Mexico.

As American Christians, we all get engaged with the Presidential elections, a smaller number of us with the Congressional, but almost none of us with the judicial system. Yet in a way, the influence on our society is inverse in order of importance. Here are a few reflections that I offer to prime the pump for reflecting on some of these matters.

1. By trying the parties separately, the defense of each is able to point the finger at the others. Tom, Dick, and Harry are jointly guilty: Tom points to Dick, Dick points to Harry, and Harry points to Tom. They could all get off because of “reasonable doubt.” It can work, because evidence is presented and spun differently in each case, and each case has a separate jury. In a composite trial, this would not be possible: there would be palpable contradictions in the evidence. We are suffering from an absence of a single authority that can say, “this is absurd, we need to combine evidence into a single process.” We are ending up with Three Stooges style justice.

2. Without specifying who the culprit should be, it seems to me that someone should be held liable for murder. Not first degree, granted. But to refer to this as “involuntary” seems to miss something. It reminds me of my boyhood plea, “I didn’t try to,” to which my father rightly answered, “but you didn’t try not to.” 

Voluntary as in “of the will” is more subtle than these people think. It has a negative as well as a positive aspect.

3. What’s disgusting about this case is the behavior of these Hollywood leftists, in contrast to how right wing middle-America types do. (We know that Baldwin is an idiot Leftist, and statistically, I take it as safe to assume most of the crew was as well. Many of them probably support gun-grabbing legislation, or even repealing the second amendment.) Conservatives are trained early and reminded often of “Cooper’s rules,” which include things like Assume every weapon is loaded, and Do not point a gun at anything you do not intend to destroy. If handed an allegedly empty gun, we check it anyway, and do not point it at anything living. Most of us have been dressed down at least once for carelessness. Weapons are treated with respect and seriousness. 

Now contrast the behavior of this crew of Hollywooders fooling around with weapons, waving them around, having boxes with a mixture of live bullets and dummies, and multiple calibers. At least once, the wrong shell was forced into the cylinder. Not once but twice a live round went off before the fatal one. 

Why was there even a single live round in the stockroom, let alone many?

The authorities should have been called the minute a single live round was ever discovered.

The outtakes that showed the bloated, bleary-eyed Baldwin swinging a revolver around like some lurching, melting-down robot, tells us everything. Alec, please — Starbucks was invented so that puffy, pompous statists like you can spend your time in a comfy chair sipping Thai Lattes while murmuring the latest Manifesto to your minions. Do not even pretend to be a gun-slinger. It’s too silly.

4. For the person to be in charge of the guns and ammo, the management hires

• a 24-year old
• a 24-year-old girl
• a 24-year-old dumb valley girl
• a 24-year-old dumb valley girl with a baggie of cocaine in her pocket

I imagine she was texting her friends about the cocaine party tonight, as the gun went off. (I know, technically she wasn’t raised in the valley.)

Every Southern town has several dozen young men that have handled weapons since the age of six, who know the rules and enforce them on others even in voluntary associations, who would have handled this job flawlessly and would have been willing to work on a Hollywood set for peanuts. (Just watch the testimony by Bryan Carpenter, on day 6 of the trial.) But they wanted to hire a dumb valley girl with a baggie of cocaine in her pocket.

5. I feel like a liberal as I assess responsibility. When a scholar in the hood pops off a cap into someone’s head for a cell phone, the liberal cries It’s society! racism! poverty! 

And here I am, when a dumb valley girl with a baggie of cocaine in her pocket loads a live round into a gun, and the pudgy leftist pulls the trigger, killing the cinematographer — here I am crying It’s society! management!

The prosecutor and her witnesses keep saying “she took the job, she could have walked off if her instructions were disobeyed.” That’s so dumb. It’s the hiring manager’s job to determine if someone is qualified to do a job. It’s not the hiree’s job.

It’s not just the atmosphere of feminism that led to this. Somehow, an attitude has crept into currency that everything is easy. But in reality, nothing is easy. 

A restaurant hires an 18-year-old bimbette to run the bar, then overworks her with duties so there is no time to chat — one of the main “jobs” of the traditional bartender. More importantly, she has never been trained to mix a good Martini. If you order one, you will have to explain how, or she will look it up on google. The manager thinks everything is easy — but nothing is easy. So the Martini is bitter, or salty, or too warm. It is not made with panache, with the swag that we used to expect of a bartender. 

It is not only feminism that produced this attitude. It is more generally a lack of care, a lack of striving for excellence, a cutting every corner.

6. But feminism feeds this frenzy. Feminism plus “everything is easy” feed off each other, and in symbiosis, leads to our tragi-comic society. A couple months ago, I was let go from a project headed by a girl “engineer” who actually knew nothing about engineering. A year after I was hired, the project is actually further behind than it was at the beginning. Each month, they go to the customer with the line, “we just need one more month, this time for sure.” And like Charlie Brown with the football, the customer keeps doing it! This is what American aerospace industry is becoming.

I actually think this situation is a good thing. It’s going to give the good guys, like Russia, a chance to close the military gap with 1/10 the budget. But if we were a serious country, it would be at once insane and comedic. 

Conclusion

I have wept several times during the testimony given at this trial. My heart goes out to Halyna of course, but also there is a crushing feeling that 1,000 years of Anglo-Saxon and Christian history has led to… this. We have become a joke of a country. We were a far better people when we were still living in mud huts.

The trial testimony is an arm-wrestle between two theories:

• the defense: there were several persons that should bear responsibility, and Hannah is the least of them because she was young, over-worked, and pushed around
• the prosecution: regardless of anyone else’s failings, as Armorer it was her job to do this job correctly and by accepting the job she must bear responsibility

I actually think that the defense’s thesis is more accurate; but that nonetheless Hannah should go to prison for 18 months. This might be the first spanking she has ever received, and though long overdue, better late than never.

But someone else — probably Alec Baldwin, as well as others — should be held liable for some level of murder, probably with something like a life sentence.