Alec Baldwin

There's so many unanswered questions.

Everyone is wondering, how did live ammunition get in there?

But something went horribly wrong here in Santa Fe on the set of Alec Baldwin's new Western film, Rust.

The idea that a gun could have been fired and someone could have been killed in 2021 on the set of a movie was completely shocking.

And ultimately, the big question is, who is to blame?

There are so many questions that investigators are trying to answer.

The who, what, why, and how.

How on earth does this happen?

It turns out there have been a number of different questions raised about what exactly caused the deadly shooting to occur.

Here's the reality.

Guns have been used in Hollywood movies for decades and decades and decades.

The live ammunition is never supposed to be on the set of a movie or television show.

End of story.

Obviously, we want to know how that live round got on the set, but what's more important is how that live round got into the gun.

Dutch Merrick is a longtime Hollywood armorer and prop master, and though he didn't work on Rust, he told us his protocol for checking rounds.

I would isolate it from the rest of the dummy rounds.

If there's any question, any anomaly, it's not going into the gun, it's not going onto the film set.

According to a search warrant, Assistant Director Dave Hulls told investigators that Gutierrez-Reed opened up the firearm that would be used by Baldwin, but Hulls said he could only remember seeing three rounds and that he should have checked all the chambers of the gun but didn't, and he couldn't recall if Gutierrez-Reed spun the drum.

Hulls also told investigators he didn't know that there were any live rounds in the gun.

An attorney representing Dave Hulls has said it was not his client's responsibility to confirm whether that gun was loaded.