Have you seen a James Bond movie?
Yes.
Well, you've seen an actor point a gun at the camera and pulling the trigger.
Was your immediate thought that that was a serious breach of basic gun safety protocols?
I'm willing to bet my left testicle that it wasn't.
I'm a pro-gun libertarian; but, I'm also a filmmaker. Right now, my fellow pro-gun libertarians are driving me nuts with this indignation and the snarky explainers toward movie makers about gun safety.
If you've seen 500 movies in your life you've probably seen 250 movies in which a gun was held to somebody's temple at point blank range. You might have seen a movie like Rocknrolla in which they actually mounted a camera on a gun while the dude was firing. The only way that your indignation isn't just an expedient to make fun of Hollywood liberals or downright hypocritical is if you can honestly say that you were simply taken aback and horrified every time you saw a Bond movie.
I'm guessing that most of you can't honestly say that.
The thing that drives me nuts is that almost every movie set breaks basic safety protocols in every way and nobody cares until something goes wrong.
Isn't it basic car safety to not drive your car off a bridge and into a lake? I would think it is; but, they did that on the film The Contender and nobody seemed to have a problem with it. If somebody had died performing that stunt, would we have the same Monday morning quarterbacking?
It's not generally considered to be safe to jump out of a plane at 20,000 feet. Well, Tom Cruise did it at the age of 58 for our entertainment.
Is it safe to crash a plane into the ocean? Well, they did it on Dunkirk.