Poker Run, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Smallville actor John Schneider questioned Alec Baldwin’s claim that he didn’t realize he shot Halyna Hutchins while performing a reenactment.
Baldwin claimed he didn’t realize he shot Hutchins in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos.
After changing his story about whether the gun was cocked, Baldwin tells Stephanopoulos his story about what happened just before he shot Hutchins, “I’m holding. I’m just showing her. I go, ‘How about that? Does that work? You see that?’ Do you see that? Do you see that?’ She goes, ‘Yeah that’s good.’ I let go of the hammer. Bang. The gun goes off.”
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The actor then went on to detail the moments right after the gun went off, “Everyone is horrified. They are shocked. It’s loud. They don’t have their earplugs in. The gun was supposed to be empty. I was told I was handed an empty gun. If there were cosmetic rounds, nothing with a charge at all. A flash round, nothing.”
“She goes down. I thought to myself, ‘Did she faint?’ The notion that there was a live round in that gun did not dawn on me until probably 45 minutes to an hour later,” he claimed.
Baldwin went on, “She’s laying there and I go, ‘Did she get hit by wadding? Sometimes those blank rounds have a wadding inside that packs like a cloth that packs the gunpowder. Sometimes wadding comes out and it can hit people and it can feel like a little bit of a poke.”
“But no one could understand. Did she have a heart attack? The idea that someone put a live bullet in the gun was not even in reality,” the actor asserted.
Baldwin did claim he went up to Hutchins after he shot her, “”I went up to her and then we were immediately told to get out of the building. We were forced to get out of the building. The medics came in. I mean I stood over her for 60 seconds. And she just laid there kind of in shock.”
Schneider questioned this claim in a recent upload to his YouTube channel, where he reenacted Baldwin’s claim about the shooting.
While reenacting the shooting with a number of experts, Schneider dry fires a revolver twice before actually firing it.
“I expect this, and I get this,” Schneider says. “Here’s the question. Why were you not surprised? … If you were holding this gun and you expected click and you got bang, why were you not surprised?”
He asks one of the experts again, “But if it went off in your hand, would you not be surprised?” The expert responds, “I would be very surprised that it went off in my hand.”
“Then why would you say on national television that you weren’t aware that anything had gone wrong for 45 minutes?”, questions Schneider.
“He had to know the gun shot. There’s no way that you can shoot a gun and don’t know it,” the expert answers. “But if he shot the gun, he had to see the immediate reaction of the people that got shot. So you had to know right then that you shot somebody. As soon as you’ve shot.”
Schneider then posits, “If you expected click and you got the size of that hole right there, I think you would have crapped your pants.”
He goes on to assert, “That to me is the question. Why was he not shocked when that happened. And why then did he say he was unaware that someone had been shot when he’s looking at them until 45 minutes later. I’m trying to make that make sense to me and I can’t.”
Later in the video, Schneider postulates, “The only reason I can think of is that you’re not surprised is because you expected to get bang.”
The Smallville actor goes on to theorize that Baldwin might have been attempting to play a prank with the gun.
He explained, “The only reason why that would not have scared me would have been if I knew it was there. The only reason I would be cavalier about it—because he said, ‘I thought maybe she had a heart attack or fainted.’
“Now, if my intention was to scare the crap out of you and I pull the trigger and it went bang and that didn’t surprise me then I think there’s every likelihood that he believed he had scared her and she fainted. I believe that part because they say people were taken out and people were unaware of the gruesomeness that was there,” Schneider theorized.
Even further into the video, Schneider would reiterate his skepticism about Baldwin’s claim saying, “The most natural thing in the world to do if you get bang instead of click is to think, ‘Oh my God! What just happened?’ no matter how much issues you have with anger.”
He continued, “In my mind, the only way you can not react that way. The way Kim Potter, the police officer, reacted when she realized she had shot the guy with a gun and not a taster. That brought her to her knees.”
“Bam! Right down to the ground. ‘Oh my God! What did I do? I shot him. I did it. I shot him.’ None of that happened. So either you are the most arrogant, nasty prick in the world or you expected what just happened and didn’t know that there was a bullet in there,” Schneider posited.
Schneider did defend the film industry and the fact that they do indeed have actors aim guns at each other for a scene.
He stated, “In defense of the movie industry, the reason why it was pointed where it was pointed was because just like us trying, we had a hard time trying to set this camera up for this, so we just put it on the side of the hill and shot next today it.”
“She was, as cinematographers will do, and as I, as a director will do, we set up a shot, right? So in order for that shot to have been the one that she wanted, she was right next to the camera looking at the monitor telling him where to aim,”
“So, that’s how that’s done feeling that she was perfectly safe because there should never be a live round on a set. And there should never even be a blank or anything during a rehearsal,” he concluded.
What do you make of Schneider’s theory about what happened and his questioning of Baldwin’s story?