While no one seems to know how a live bullet ended up in the gun, FBI reports say that the revolver was in “working order,” and Alec Baldwin would have had to cock the gun and pull the trigger in order to fire it, per Newsweek. Now, the actor is focusing on who he thinks is responsible for the incident, and the finger points to the armorer and props assistant, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, and the assistant director, Dave Halls.
“Someone put a live bullet in the gun who should have known better,” Baldwin told CNN on August 19. “That was [Gutierrez Reed’s] job. Her job was to look at the ammunition and put in the dummy round or the blank round, and there wasn’t supposed to be any live rounds on the set.” He continued, “There are two people who didn’t do what they were supposed to do. I’m not sitting there saying I want them to, you know, go to prison, or I want their lives to be hell… but I want everybody to know that those are the two people that are responsible for what happened.”
Gutierrez Reed, however, believes that she was sabotaged. “I believe that somebody who would do that would want to sabotage the set, want to prove a point, want to say that they’re disgruntled, they’re unhappy,” Gutierrez-Reed’s attorney Jason Bowles told “Today” in November 2021.
