One of multiple live bullets found on the set of “Rust” by investigators of the 2021 fatal shooting was discovered in the bandolier of actor Jensen Ackles, according to crime scene technician Marissa Poppell.
Poppell disclosed the detail while on the stand during the second day of testimony in the involuntary manslaughter trial of actor Alec Baldwin, nearly three years after cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot on the New Mexico set of the Western film.
Asked about the live rounds of ammunition that were discovered on set, Poppell said investigators found some on a prop cart, in a box of ammo and also in two prop gun holsters — the one worn by Alec Baldwin and another worn by co-star Ackles.
They fix everything in post anyway; why do they have to fire blanks and not just cap gun caps?
Blanks have less recoil than live rounds anyway, a large part of the recoil is due to the weight of the projectile.
So make a caliber that’s only used for prop guns and blanks.
The trick is getting the whole industry to standardize on it
You don’t need a working chamber at all; with modern cgi you can make it indistinguishable from the real thing.
Well while that’s a pretty great video, it’s definitely not “indistinguishable”.
I mean, you are correct that it can be made indistinguishable, but this youtube skit ain’t that, although it’s pretty fucking hilarious.
Yes and no. There are both but real guns are typically used for hero shots because they have the right weight and make the right noises.
There’s also blank firing adapters for some weapons which are fairly big and obvious but essentially split the round in two as it exits the barrel and mushes them up so they lose all their energy.
That’s not really what BFAs do, at least not the models I’ve used. You seem to imply that weapons with BFAs fitted are still firing real rounds, which are rendered safe by hitting the adapter. That’s not true. They are firing blanks, which are cartridges with the bullet and some of the powder removed. Pull the trigger, you get a pop, a flash, and some smoke. Yay!
Pull the trigger again though, and you’re very likely to have a misfire because the next round failed to feed from the magazine to the chamber. This is because most semi or fully automatic weapons use some of the energy of a fired round to cycle the action which expels the spent cartridge and feeds a fresh round into the firing chamber. When you fire a real bullet, it actually acts as something of a plug in the barrel for the very brief period of time it travels through it. This allows the pressure to overcome the resistance of the weapon’s action, and thus operate.
When you fire a blank, there’s no bullet. No bullet means no plug, which means that all of the gas from the explosion just rushes right out the end of the barrel and is not enough to cycle the gun. This, you have to manually run the action, turning your scary big black assault rifle into a quaint bolt action rifle.
So, how do you solve this problem? You make your own plug and stick it on the end of the barrel to redirect all of the energy through the weapon system rather than expelling it. That’s a all a BFA is, a metal post matched to the diameter of the barrel that screws into place to plug it. This has the additional positive of preventing anything from exiting the barrel accidentally while firing blanks, which is useful in the training contexts that you often see these devices, because you’re often “firing” on other people.
If you were to use a BFA in the manner you describe, i.e. with a real bullet, you’re certainly going to damage the shit out of your weapon, and possibly wind up in the Emergency Room because you caught some metal splinters in the face when the end of your weapon exploded.
You seem to imply that weapons with BFAs fitted are still firing real rounds, which are rendered safe by hitting the adapter. That’s not true. They are firing blanks, which are cartridges with the bullet and some of the powder removed. Pull the trigger, you get a pop, a flash, and some smoke.
They aren’t wrong though. There’s different types of “blanks”. There are blanks which are completely “blank”, but there are also “blanks” which just have a regular shaped bullet, but a very light one, made out of balsa wood, and those do require a blank-firing adapter and while they wouldn’t fly far from the barrel, you could hurt someone with one probably, but more importantly the blank-firing adapter also restricts the gases which are let out, thus increasing the (otherwise inadequate) pressure on the reload mechanism, so you don’t have to manually reload. In fact, we here in Finland call it “sysäyksenvahvistin”, and the direct translation wouldn’t be “blank-firing adapter”, but “increaser-of-pushback-pressure”, more or less.
It’s easier to make blanks like that than it is to make ones which don’t expel anything and still manage to keep a semi- or fullauto reloading.
There’s a mandated 50m safety distance for these, but I once got shot in the face from less than a metre a way while we were practicing urban warfare. I was spitting balsa wood for the rest of the day.
One dipshit ones had blanks in his mag, didn’t have his safety on, didn’t have his blank-firing adapter installed, and the gun was fucking loaded. Sure it probably wouldn’t have killed anyone, but that shit was still dangerous.
Soooo yeah, it is exactly what certain types of blank-firing adapters do.
True. I guess they don’t do it because they’d basically need 1 nonstandard “blank only” variant for each actual caliber, otherwise the bigger gas/blowback-operated guns might have some trouble cycling ?
Yeah in my mind it’d be a “blank-only” gun, a movie prop. Which is well within the budget for movies like this, I mean they have a dedicated armorer. Resizing a barrel isn’t uncommon, based on Wikipedia searches, so while it might be a hassle, it could definitely be done within a reasonable timeframe and cost, and avoid any mechanical issues with the gun, but would be pretty high on the list of things a movie would cut corners on if it decided to.
Which is what I gather happened here, anyway, so maybe this IS standard practice.
