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Alec Baldwin would have had to pull the trigger for his gun to fire in the fatal “Rust” movie set shooting, a new Federal Bureau of Investigation forensic report concludes.
Mr. Baldwin, who produced and starred in the picture, believed he was handling a “cold gun” without live ammo on set in Oct. 2021. The gun he was brandishing, in fact, had live ammo, and it was fired, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
“The trigger wasn’t pulled. I didn’t pull the trigger,” Mr. Baldwin said in a Dec. 2021 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopolous.
FBI forensics disagrees. In the report acquired by ABC News, accidental discharge testing showed that the gun used, a .45 Long Colt caliber F.LLI Pietta single-action revolver, would not and cannot fire without the trigger being pulled.
If the hammer was quarter or half-cocked, the gun “could not be made to fire without a pull of the trigger,” per the report cited by ABC News.
If the hammer of the gun was fully cocked, then it still would not be able to fire without a trigger pull if the “working internal components were intact and functional,” according to the report quoted by ABC News.
When the hammer was un-cocked and the chamber was loaded, the gun was able to detonate the primer without the pull of the trigger only when the hammer was struck directly, according to ABC News.
The forensic report comes as part of a homicide investigation by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, which obtained the FBI report on Aug. 2, according to Deadline.
Investigators from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office are still waiting for Mr. Baldwin’s phone records. Those records, along with the forensic report, will be pored over before a full case file is compiled and sent to the Santa Fe District Attorney.
• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.
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