Written by: Robert McAlister, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Rust Film Shooting
On October 21, 2021, at the Bonanza Creek Ranch in Bonanza City, New Mexico, United States, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot, and director Joel Souza was wounded on the set of the film Rust by actor Alec Baldwin when he fired a revolver loaded with a live round, which had been provided to him as a prop (interesting term, one we will come back to later). Subsequently, it appears that the weapon had not been thoroughly checked for safety in advance based on the current investigation into the incident.
How Could Such an Accident Happen
As part of my wider coaching work, I regularly deliver theatrical weapons awareness courses for actors and support cast from across the Film and TV industry. I have spent many years working with and around firearms all over the world. The courses we run are designed to promote safety, awareness and confidence which then allows for a more convincing and accurate usage on screen or stage.
The use of firearms on film sets is well regulated with many protocols in place to safeguard against such accidents. On a safe production, each firearm is meticulously inspected every time it changes hands. It means every take of every angle of every scene; the same weapon could be checked and re-checked dozens upon dozens of times in a single day.
Live ammunition, without question, is never allowed on set. Aside from the actors during a scene, the firearms specialist is the only person who handles the weapons and the only person who can open them for full inspection by cast and crew.
On film sets, the person most responsible for safety is usually the First Assistant Director, and as a result, they will also inspect the firearm – a task the director, producer, camera operator or cinematographer may oversee, too.
The Peltzman Effect
The Peltzman Effect (named after Professor Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago) is a theory which states that people are more likely to engage in risky behaviour when safety measures have been mandated.
Although the Peltzman Effect has now been applied to a wide range of domains such as extreme sports, health-related behaviours, and financial investments, it was initially first studied with regards to automobile safety, after new automobile safety measures had been introduced in the late 1960’s. It was found that although these new safety measures reduced the risk of death if an accident occurred, there was no decrease in automobile death rates because the safety benefits had been offset by an increase in the number of accidents taking place.
In fact, Peltzman concluded that while these safety measures increased safety for vehicle occupants, they led to increased deaths for bystanders such as pedestrians or other drivers on the road. This was because drivers believed that there was a lower risk, so they were more likely to drive recklessly, which ultimately cancelled out the benefits from the safety measures.
Preparations for the Fatal Rehearsal
On the twelfth day of the shoot, on October 21, 2021, the cast and crew were rehearsing a gunfight scene taking place inside of a church at the Bonanza Creek Ranch. Firearms and ammunition were retrieved from a locked safe and Gutierrez-Reed (the firearms specialist) placed three guns used as props on a cart. Among them was a plastic gun that could not shoot live ammunition, a modified weapon that could not fire any type of ammunition, and a solid-frame .45 Colt revolver made by Pietta, this last one was the one that Baldwin fired.
There are conflicting accounts of how Baldwin came into possession of the revolver.
According to a search warrant, the guns were briefly checked by armorer Gutierrez-Reed, before assistant director Halls took the weapon from the ‘prop’ (there we go again) cart and handed it to Baldwin.
In a subsequent affidavit, Halls said the safety protocol regarding this firearm was such that Gutierrez-Reed would open the loading gate of the revolver and rotate the cylinder to expose the chambers so he could inspect them himself. According to the affidavit, Halls did not check all cylinder chambers; he recalled seeing three rounds at the time, while the gun was loaded with at least four, one of which we know now was a live round. The warrant also states that Halls announced the term "cold gun", meaning that it was empty, which clearly contradicts the previous statement which is odd.
According to statements, several crew members took several ‘prop’ guns off-set that day, including the firearm involved in the incident, to pass the time shooting at beer cans with live ammunition. After a lunch break, the ‘prop’ guns had been returned. It is not clear if the firearms were ever checked again.
Do safety measures reduce risk?
While safety measures themselves can certainly help to lower risk, the Peltzman Effect suggests that when safety measures are implemented, people tend to increase their risky behaviours. Why does this happen? According to Peltzman, when safety measures are implemented, people’s perception of risk decreases, and so people may feel that they can now afford to make riskier decisions. As a result, the phenomenon predicts that mandatory safety measures experience a lower benefit than we would expect because the safety benefits brought about by these measures are offset to some extent by increases in risky behaviour.
I have witnessed similar effects when training individuals to work in hostile environments around the world. Even with limited levels of instruction in a benign training environment, you can see participants taking more risk as they feel more confident, being exposed daily to threatening simulations and surviving, possibly creating a false sense of ability and therefore personal safety. This only increases again once you give them body armour and armoured vehicles. Whilst this is seen as the very purpose for such training, it reinforces for me, the old saying a little knowledge is a dangerous thing!
Accident Waiting to Happen?
The absence of a medic during the production was an early and noted concern. Firearms safety protocols were not distributed with the call sheets and were not strictly followed on the set; only three safety meetings for the crew were held during filming.
Several crew members also cited that they were not being paid and began advocating for safer work conditions. A crew member added, "We cited everything from lack of payment for three weeks, taking our hotels away despite asking for them in our deals, lack of COVID safety, and on top of that, poor gun safety! Poor on-set safety period!"
Furthermore, before the incident occurred, two prop guns had previously fired a total of three times unintentionally (Baldwin's stunt double had accidentally fired two blanks when he was told a prop gun was "cold", and a young woman had shot herself in the foot with a blank round). However, the production did not launch an investigation into the negligent discharges and later claimed they "were not made aware of any official complaints concerning weapon or prop safety on set”.
All the warning signs were there, the near misses, the red flags but perhaps over reliance on safety protocols, the firearms specialist, and the term prop (after all the weapon used was able to fire live rounds and had just hours before) meant they fell afoul of risk compensation?
The Good the Bad and the Ugly of Risk Taking
Although Peltzman’s research has been both replicated and called into question over the years (there are many ways to interpret the same dataset), risk compensation is apparent in many other areas. As Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy write in Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, children who play sports involving protective gear (like helmets and knee pads) take more physical risks, and hikers who think they can be easily rescued are less cautious on the trails.
A study of taxi drivers in Munich, Germany, found that those driving vehicles with antilock brakes had more accidents than those without—unsurprising, considering they tended to accelerate faster and stop harder.
As defences against worldwide disasters have improved, populations have moved, and nations have developed higher risk areas such as flood plains and exposed coastlines and deaths from events like floods or hurricanes have not necessarily decreased.
After helmets were introduced in American football, tackling fatalities increased for a few years, as players were more willing to strike heads (this changed with the adoption of new tackling standards.) Bailouts and protective mechanisms for financial institutions may have contributed to the scale of the 2008 financial crisis, as they led to banks taking greater and greater risks. There are numerous other examples.
We can easily see risk compensation play out in our lives and those of people around us. Someone takes up a healthy habit, like going to the gym, then compensates by drinking more. Having an emergency fund in place can encourage us to take greater financial risks.
I mentioned previously that I have trained people to work in hostile environments and one big point that I made time after time was that standard operating procedures can be incredibly dangerous. By their very nature, they are standard and extremely rigid. This can be a dangerous strategy as you may begin to follow a fixed pattern response when prompted and this could mean you are predictable and therefore setting patterns. You need to consider the context you are in and apply what I call Sensible (not Standard) Operating Procedures as no procedure fits every situation, you must think and make dynamic decisions, make dynamic risks assessments, and respond accordingly. When everyone is trained to act in the same way they will not necessarily be thinking, just following the group or crowd’s actions. Could this have been a factor in the shooting?
The Covid-19 Pandemic
The Peltzman Effect has a wide range of applications relating to risk-taking behaviours, in the domain of health-related behaviours. A critical potential application relates to the current Covid-19 pandemic, specifically the impact and efficacy of vaccination campaigns.
We could predict that people who have been vaccinated may feel a heightened sense of security and therefore engage in riskier behaviours that may facilitate transmission of the virus. Moreover, as more people get vaccinated, these behaviours may be heightened, as people may believe that there are further reduced risks from herd immunity, despite there still being a long time before this widespread immunity is achieved. Additionally, while positive messaging related to the safety benefits of vaccinations may be helpful in encouraging people to take the vaccine, it could potentially lead to a reduced perception of risk among those vaccinated. As a result, the benefits of vaccination programs in reducing transmission of Covid-19 could be reduced in part by the risks of vaccinated people increasing social interactions and taking less safety precautions due to their reduced perception of risk.
What We Can Learn from Risk Compensation?
We can learn many lessons from risk compensation and the research that has been done on the subject. First, safety measures are more effective the less visible they are. If people don’t know about risk reduction, they won’t change their behaviour to compensate for it. When we want to make something safer, it’s best to ensure changes go as unnoticed as possible.
Second, an effective method to reduce risk-taking behaviour is to provide incentives for prudent behaviour, giving people a reason to adjust their risk thermostats. Just because it seems like something has become safer doesn’t mean the risk hasn’t transferred elsewhere, putting a different group of people in danger as when seat belt laws lead to more pedestrian fatalities. So, for instance, lower insurance premiums for careful drivers might result in fewer fatalities than stricter road safety laws because it causes them to make positive changes to their behaviour, instead of shifting the risk elsewhere.
Third, we are biased towards intervention. When we want to improve a situation, our first instinct tends to be to step in and change something, anything. Sometimes it is wiser to do less or even nothing. Changing something does not always make people safer, sometimes it just changes the nature of the danger.
Fourth, when we make a safety change, we may need to implement corresponding rules to avoid risk compensation. Football helmets made the sport more dangerous at first, but new rules about tackling helped cancel out the behaviour changes because the league was realistic about the need for more than just physical protection.
Interestingly years ago, in a previous role, I was working with a team on what is now called ‘shared space’ concepts. Shared space is an urban design approach that minimises the segregation between modes of road user. This is done by removing features such as kerbs, road surface markings, traffic signs, and traffic lights. It is based on studies that suggest, by creating a greater sense of uncertainty and making it unclear who has priority, drivers will reduce their speed, in turn reducing the dominance of vehicles, reducing road casualty rates, and improving safety for other road users.
Finally, making people feel less safe can improve their risk behaviour. Serious injuries in car crashes are rarer when the roads are icy, even if minor incidents are more common because drivers take more care. If we want to improve safety, we can make risks more visible through better education.
Could the Rust Fatality have been avoided?
Risk compensation certainly doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to take steps to make ourselves safer, but it does illustrate how we need to be aware of unintended consequences that occur when we interact with complex systems. We can’t always expect to achieve the changes we desire first time around. Once we make a change, we should pay careful attention to the effects on the whole system to see what happens.
Without a doubt yes, the fatal shooting could have been avoided, if all the usual protocols and safety awareness had been followed, but therein lays the problem. It's back to basic human biases, carelessness, lack of awareness and good old risk compensation and that aspect can only be tackled through proper training, coaching and challenging risk awareness throughout the processes.
The information in this article may prove to be inaccurate, we will have to wait until the investigation has been completed to gain full insight into what happened on that day in New Mexico. One thing is for sure, it was a reminder to all of us that personal safety is not a guarantee and something that needs constant attention and focus from everyone however safe you are made to feel or believe.
That element of danger may just make us think more and therefore makes us safer!
Robert McAlister, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Robert’s mantra is ‘think differently’ and he certainly walks that talk in everything he does. Certainly not one for taking the easy path, he thrives on a challenge and the words ‘the most tenacious person we know’ are a major understatement. He is a recognized leader in the field of leadership and team coaching. and is the Director and driving force behind Glenbarr Coaching, who offers a very different coaching experience. For over 30 years he has worked globally with a diverse range of high-profile clients from Governments to NGO’s, Private Sector Corporates to Public Sector Agencies. Celebrities and Senior Executives who have all benefitted from his sought-after talents. Such a wide portfolio and body of work has provided him with very unique insights and approaches to training and coaching strategies that work and are sustainable. The central theme to Robert’s career has been people development and growth. Specialising in mindset, behaviours, and team dynamics to effect positive outcomes and increased performance. Equally, at home in the boardroom or challenging field environments getting his hands dirty, Robert’s real magic is bringing the best out of individuals or teams to achieve their goals. If you are looking for a truly transformational experience that is remembered and relived long after any official training or coaching session, then Robert is the guy to talk to!
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