Alec Baldwin isn’t the sort of person who usually engenders compassion. The actor and political activist’s angry-man outbursts and other antics through decades of stardom have created an in-your-face persona that leaves little space for fuzzier considerations.
But today, the actor is richly deserving of our sympathy. His accidental lethal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, 42, and wounding of movie director Joel Souza, 48, on the set of “Rust” last week is the stuff of nightmares. Sadly, Baldwin doesn’t get to wake up to the realization that it was all a bad dream.
I don’t know how one navigates that kind of horror. Plenty of people have had to find out. Though accidental gun deaths are relatively rare (under 2% of all shooting deaths) compared with suicides and homicides, this isn’t a first for the movie industry. Most infamously, Brandon Lee was fatally shot on the set of “The Crow” in 1993. In both cases, the deaths were, by definition, avoidable had safety precautions been properly taken.
Details of the “Rust” shooting are still emerging. Two people were reportedly responsible for securing the prop gun’s safety. First was 24-year-old armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. The Los Angeles Times reported that two other accidental discharges already had occurred on the set. The armorer is in charge of making sure prop guns are free of live ammunition.
Second in line was assistant director Dave Halls, who also was supposed to check the gun. When he handed it to Baldwin, Halls reportedly shouted, “cold gun,” meaning it contained no live ammunition.
What happened in Baldwin’s case was an instant of random timing intersecting with human fallibility. Hutchins wasn’t filming when Baldwin sat down on a church pew to practice a shot in which he used his draw hand to pull his gun from the holster on the other side of his body. The first time he drew, nothing happened. The second time, the gun fired and hit both people at once. Souza was behind Hutchins at the time, looking over her shoulder.
Such details haunt the imagination. We put ourselves in Baldwin’s shoes and try to imagine what he felt upon realizing what had happened. Seeing him so distraught and plainly grieving in photos snapped after the shooting should move anyone to empathy and pause our nation’s default cynicism. But not in our spiritually hollowed-out world, where meanness is a virtue and hatred is the coin of the realm.
Of all people, J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy” and a Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, tweeted the following to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: “Dear @jack let Trump back on. We need Alec Baldwin tweets.” As is well known, Twitter banned Donald Trump from the platform after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
I can’t fathom how someone so apparently intelligent and empathic as Vance could resort to such callousness. This is the same man who wrote a critically acclaimed memoir of his White working-class upbringing that shed needed light on Trump’s rise to power. In so doing, he exposed his own family with a raw realism, coupled with humor. I loved both the book and the movie that was made from it. But Vance has squandered any good will toward him with his desperate grab for Trumpworld approval.
In so doing, too, Vance may have written his own tragedy. By any measure, he should lose his campaign. In a better world, it would be because he insulted the Trump (and his own) base by implying that they’d applaud the mocking of people in shock and grief. Meanwhile, Trump has been a bystander to this story who, one can always hope, has discovered the interior rewards of the high road. He may well despise Baldwin for his wicked impersonations of him on “Saturday Night Live,” which were hilarious to anyone with a sense of humor. But contrary to Vance’s craven calculation, Trump has stayed silent on the tragedy.
Not so Donald Trump Jr., who has been hawking T-shirts with the slogan: “Guns don’t kill people, Alec Baldwin kills people.” Uncharmingly, he offered an unprintable defense to critics of the shirts that summed up his character.
As investigation into the shooting continues, two things seem true: What Baldwin did was a terrible accident. What Vance and the younger Trump have done were attacks not only on Baldwin but also on every American who values and strives for decency.
It’s time to stop giving passes to such people and to support only those who can demonstrate by words and deeds that they know what decency and civility are. Isn’t that the world we want for our children and grandchildren? It shouldn’t be hard to sort them all out.
Email kathleenparker @washpost.com.