Hollywood petition to ban the use of live weapons on film sets gathers over ...

A change.org petition calling for Hollywood to ban the use of firearms on film sets has gathered over 10,000 signatures since it was created on Thursday after cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was accidentally shot dead by Alec Baldwin when he was given a prop gun loaded with live ammunition. 

The petition was started by Hutchins' friend and colleague Director Bandar Albuliwi who wrote: 'We need to make sure that this avoidable tragedy never happens again. There is no excuse for something like this to happen in the 21st century. Real guns are no longer needed on film production sets.' 

Albuliwi directly calls on Baldwin 'to use his power and influence in the Hollywood film industry to make change.'

Craig Zobel, who directed HBO's Mare of Easttown, a cop drama, agrees with Albuliwi and the 10,000 people who signed the petition explaining that he used fake guns and special effects in his show. 

He tweeted: 'There’s no reason to have guns loaded with blanks or anything on set anymore. Should just be fully outlawed. There’s computers now. 

'The gunshots on Mare of Easttown are all digital. You can probably tell, but who cares? It’s an unnecessary risk.'

He explained: 'I concede live rounds have a role on set: I do think there are protocols to doing it safely, and I’ve had live rounds on sets for years. Always made me nervous, though. So this last project we didn’t. I think it took a level of anxiety away. We still used squibs, dust caps, etc.'

ABC's The Rookie, another cop drama, just announced a ban on the use of live weapons after Thursday's tragic incident on the Rust set. 

Showrunner Alexi Hawley sent an email to the crew members: 'As of today, it is now policy on The Rookie that all gunfire on set will be Air Soft guns with CG muzzle flashes added in post. There will be no more "live" weapons on the show. The safety our cast and crew is too important. Any risk is too much risk.' 

He informed the crew that moving forward the cop drama will use replica toy guns and postproduction special effects while asking the crew to report anything that made them feel unsafe on set. 

Hawley also expressed The Rookie's executives sympathy with the victims of the Rust incident.

'The tragic events in New Mexico yesterday have shaken us all, and our hearts go out to the friends and family of Halyna Hutchins and Joel Souza,' it read.  

Experts say that Baldwin ignored the golden rule of gun safety by pointing the prop at someone but the gun never should have been loaded with live ammunition to begin with. 

Zak Knight, a pyrotechnic and special effects engineer who is a member of Local 44, told DailyMail.com on Friday:  'There should have never been live rounds on a movie set, that's number one. Number two is every single person on a movie set has a right to inspect a weapon before it's fired. And number three is, there is no reason to ever put a person in front of a weapon that's firing.

'Anytime you see a movie where the barrel is pointed down the camera lens, there should not be an operator behind it. It's obvious that the considerations of this resulted in that gun being pointed directly at two people.

'We would have additionally had a barrier between them. A large number of people failed to do our protocols... every accident is a cascade of events,' he said.  

Whatever happened in the moments leading up to her death, Knight said it was caused by a 'cascade of failures' by multiple people. 'We have a hard and fast rule that no live ammunition ever goes into a prop truck or set at any time. We just don't do it. 

'If you see bullets on set they are complete dummy rounds and are in no way functional. This goes back to Brandon Lee. There's protocol.' Lee was killed in a similar incident when another actor shot him with a prop gun that was loaded with live ammunition while filming The Crow in 1993. 

Knight added that different gun laws between New Mexico and California may have also contributed to the accident. In California, both a trained armorer and a prop master is required on a film set and those are the standards the union adheres to as well.

'You will find the best and most well-trained individuals in Los Angeles. You can't guarantee that as you go across the country,' he told DailyMail.com on Friday.

Knight said that he'd heard from others involved in the production that there was a walk-out. 'It's very possible that the union members said 'we're out', and they brought in people to fill the positions on the fly. There's a lot of grey area.'

In the days before the tragedy, IATSE had been threatening a large-scale strike that would have crippled Hollywood production. Among the complaints were overworking staff and poor rates. Baldwin recorded a video of himself encouraging the union members to strike if they felt they needed to, saying studio bosses 'don't give a f**k about you', that the union shared online.

'There's a direct correlation between maintaining a safe set and the hours that we work. At a certain time there's no such thing as a safe set if we're all exhausted,' Knight, a special effects artist, said.  

One Santa Fe prop master told DailyMail.com that had the gun been checked properly before it was handed to Baldwin, the tragedy wouldn't have occurred. 

'If they'd done their job checking the weapon this wouldn't have happened. You show the assistant director the weapon, you show the actor the weapon, you show everybody it's a safe weapon. There's a big chain of command that missed an opportunity to save a life.'

Baldwin first addressed the tragedy on Twitter Friday: 'There are no words to convey my shock and sadness regarding the tragic accident that took the life of Halyna Hutchins, a wife, mother and deeply admired colleague of ours. I'm fully cooperating with the police investigation to address how this tragedy occurred and'

'I am in touch with her husband, offering my support to him and his family. My heart is broken for her husband, their son, and all who knew and loved Halyna.'

He then tweeted a Variety article titled Alec Baldwin Was Told Prop Gun Was Safe Before Fatal Shooting, Affidavit Says. 

He was pictured doubled over in grief on Thursday after speaking to the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Department immediately following the shooting.  

A public memorial will be held in Albuquerque Saturday from 6 - 7:30 pm. A GoFundMe page has been created by the International Cinematographers Guild Local 600 to raise funds to support her family. 

The American Film Institute has established a memorial scholarship to support aspiring female cinematographers in her honor. 

The 24-year-old head armorer in charge of guns on the film had admitted she wasn't sure she was ready for the job in an interview before filming started. 

'I almost didn't take the job because I wasn't sure if I was ready, but doing it, it went really smoothly,' Hannah Gutierrez-Reed said in a podcast interview last month after leading the firearms department for The Old Way, starring Nicolas Cage - her first time as head armorer.   

She also admitted in the podcast interview she found loading blanks into a gun 'the scariest' thing because she did not know how to do it and had sought help from her father, legendary gunsmith Thell Reed, to get over the fear.  

It comes as the film crew revealed they walked off set hours before the fatal accident over safety fears after firearms were accidentally discharged three times - including once by Baldwin's stunt double who had been told the gun was not loaded, and twice in a closed cabin. 

A search warrant released Friday said that Gutierrez-Reed laid out three prop guns on a cart outside the filming location, and first assistant director Dave Halls grabbed the gun from the cart and brought it inside to Baldwin, unaware that it was loaded with live rounds. 

'Cold gun!' shouted Halls before handing the gun to Baldwin, using the phrase to signal to cast and crew that the gun was safe to fire for the scene, the warrant said.  

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Seconds later, filming a scene inside an Old West-style church, Baldwin apparently aimed towards the camera and pulled the trigger, accidentally killing Hutchins as she filmed him, and injuring director Joel Souza, who stood behind her. 

Neither Halls nor Gutierrez-Reed immediately returned messages from DailyMail.com late on Friday. Neither has been charged or named as a criminal suspect in the case, though a police investigation is ongoing.  

The movie, set in 1880's Kansas, stars Baldwin as the infamous outlaw Harland Rust, whose grandson is sentenced to hang for an accidental murder.  

In the interview with the Voices of the West last month, Gutierrez-Reed revealed her father only started teaching her about guns at age 16 and that most of her training had happened in the last couple of years. 

She described filming The Old Way earlier in the year as the start of a 'long' career. 

According to her LinkedIn page, she most recently worked as a videographer at Synth Fire, a California-based news and media company, and as a documentary filmmaker for the City of Flagstaff in Arizona. 

She worked as an armorer for Yellowstone film ranch between March and June 2021, but according to the page stopped working there three months before filming for Rust started in October.

Gutierrez-Reed had only recently left Northern Arizona university, where she studied creative media and

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