"Why was I handed a hot gun?"

I'm going to ignore the obvious shoehorning of politics in there and stick to a neutral analysis from my point of view as someone who used to work at firearms maintenance and gun range technical support for almost 15 years:

I agree that a lot of actors don't have any training whatsoever and don't even know how to verify if a gun is loaded or not, let alone how to handle a gun properly. This is why they are supposed to hire specialists to babysit them and make sure they are not handed an improperly prepared weapon and supervise the handling to make sure nothing dangerous is done with the weapon (even blanks can kill). There is also a lot of other things going on in blank firing guns outside of basic gun safety rules that you need someone with the proper technical know-how to make sure everything works fine and is safe.

From a responsible gun owner's point of view hiring someone to babysit you through safe gun handling is an insane concept. But from a movie production's point of view, it actually does make sense. Movie sets can have all sorts of dangers present and each of them require specific experts to make sure everything is being done safely. There can be explosives for effects, moving vehicles and heavy equipment, heights from which deadly falls can happen and require specialized fall arrest equipment just to name a few. It is unreasonable to expect everyone present on set to be trained to expert level to ensure their own safety without expert supervision. Especially since everyone working on set is being distracted by doing their main job and might make dangerous inattention mistakes. This is why the filming industry treats firearms like just another one of those hazards requiring the oversight of an expert for safety.

Filming a movie with guns also sometimes require you to point it at someone, or at a camera with someone behind it. So the actors can't strictly adhere to all gun safety rules to do their job either, which makes it even more important to make sure that the firearms being used are not loaded with live ammunition.

Now there are many extremely important questions that need to be answered still:

- Was the expert in question competent and diligent in his duties?

- Was the expert present on stage to oversee the activities?

- Why was the gun prop handed to the actor by someone who was not the firearms expert?

- Were the safety rules set by the firearms expert followed by the production team or ignored to save time/money or any other reason?

- Was the expert put under unreasonable time constraints which forced him to compromise safety to keep up with schedule? (something he should have never done to begin with)

And more importantly:

- Why the flying fuck was a live round present on stage? It shouldn't have been there to begin with.

Some serious, potentially criminal negligence has happened there, if it wasn't downright ill-intent. We need to know how it happened first though before we can point fingers and start making suggestions on what we should change to reduce the possiblity of something like this from happening again.