Oh god.

Dear everybody:

Never never never never never point a gun that is "loaded with blanks" at anybody.

A French soldier wounded 17 people—including a 3-year-old child—when he accidentally loaded his gun with live ammunition during a hostage-taking simulation in the southern city of Carcassonne. What on earth was a 3-year-old doing in a military training scenario?

Enjoying the spectacle. According to news reports, the simulation was part of an army open house designed to allow French citizens—including the soldiers' families—to get a closer look at the elite paratrooper unit stationed in their town. ("There were loads of children, because it was a party for children above all," one witness said, according to the Times of London.) The scenario appears to have been relatively low-intensity—prior to the accident, the soldiers reportedly completed it five times without a hitch.

Look, I am not a member of any military or law enforcement organization and all I know about this horrible accident is what I read in the papers. My field has its own rules for handling weaponry, and seeing as this exercise was apparently also a performance, our big rule seems singularly relevant here:

Never never never never never point a gun that is "loaded with blanks" at anybody.

Never never never never never fire a gun that is "loaded with blanks" when the gun is near anybody. As the Slate article points out, guns using blank cartridges are going to expel something, even if it's "just" hot gas that can cause burns or abrasions.

(The only exception to this rule is the case of most professional blank-firing stage guns--built specifically for use as theatrical props--that can't expel anything out the muzzle, but instead expel hot gas out the side of the gun. Those are the guns that you can aim anywhere you like, as long as you hold them well away from your and everyone else's body.)

And just really for god's sake don't fuck around.

The actors I've worked with have generally been conscientious as hell about using weapons safely; this is in large part because they know how carelessness with weapons in performance has cost lives. (I hesitate to even use the phrase "prop weapons" in this context, because of the false sense of security the word "prop" seems to engender in some cases.) The Slate article mentions actor Jon-Erik Hexum, who accidentally killed himself by firing a blank-loaded TV prop gun directly into his head. Curiously, it doesn't mention the much more famous case of Brandon Lee, who was killed filming The Crow in 1993 when another actor shot him with a "blank-loaded" pistol that turned out to have a cartridge lodged in it from a previous use. The case of Lee's death is an often-cited example of what can happen when people screw up on prop weapon safety--particularly and horribly illustrative because it involved screwups on basically every level.

Not-so-curiously, they also don't mention my obscure pet example of this, the incident in 1587 when an actor firing a borrowed stage gun killed two audience members in one of the major London playhouses. (My reading of the Gawdy letter is different from David Riggs's; I assume that they were not firing real ammo ON PURPOSE, but were culpable in failing to check the status of their guns before using them in performance.)

So, terrible accidents happen when people use weapons without proper training; film at eleven, as we said back in the days before YouTube. What I don't understand today is how someone with extensive, professional shooting-at-people-with-real-guns training and "a spotless record" can be so dumb-assed as to wave "prop" guns around and fire "blanks" at or near spectators.

Aiming "blanks" at anybody sounds pretty dumb-assed to me under any circumstances, but I understand that shooting your gun at other participants may be what people are actually called upon to do in some training exercises. Considering this, though:

According to research (PDF) compiled by the National Tactical Officers Association, at least 36 law enforcement officers have died since 1970 due to accidental weapons discharges during training exercises.

Maybe it's time to reconsider the value of training exercises that call upon participants to fire real weapons at other human beings? I mean, shooting paintballs probably doesn't feel the same, but it'd be useful for testing how good your aim is, and paintballs very rarely cause death.