#Rust Armorer Got In Trouble On Nicolas Cage Movie For Discharging Weapons Without Warning

According to a new report from TheWrap on Tuesday, the armorer that handling the guns on set when Alec Baldwin accidentally killed Halyna Hutchins, repeatedly broke basic gun safety protocols while working on a previous film.

Related: Shooting May Still Yield Criminal Charges As ‘Enormous Amount’ Of Ammo Discovered

Just two months before getting the job on Rust, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was the armorer on a low budget Nicolas Cage movie called The Old Way. According to the film’s key grip, Stu Brumbaugh, she mishandled weapons on set and fired prop guns multiple times without warning. During one particular incident, says Stu, even the 57-year-old actor lost his s**t at the 24-year-old for firing a gun for the second time in three days without telling the cast and crew ahead of time. Cage allegedly yelled:

“Make an announcement, you just blew my f**king eardrums out!”

Following the incident, Brumbaugh says he told the assistant director that Gutierrez-Reed needed to be fired. That’s when he learned that The Old Way was her first movie in charge of weapons:

“After the second round I was pissed off. We were moving too fast. She’s a rookie.”

However, a producer denied having any memory of the claims made by Brumbaugh happening on set to TheWrap, saying:

“I have no such recollection of this event on our set. I asked my partners the same.’ They said: ‘The details on some of these accounts specifically when it pertains to The Old Way have been blown out of proportion.”

The person also said that Gutierrez-Reed worked with veteran property master Jeffrey W. Crow. However, despite the unnamed producer dismissing the complaints, another unnamed source insisted that the inexperienced armorer “put the cast and crew in several unnecessary and dangerous situations.” Gutierrez-Reed reportedly walked onto the set with live rounds or blanks without announcing it to the cast or crew. She also carried pistols underneath her armpits and held rifles in each hand that was pointed at people while she moved around the set. What is even more alarming is that she allowed firearms to be aimed at others. WTF?!

Furthermore, a source told The Daily Beast that she also handed a gun to 11-year-old actress Ryan Kiera Armstrong! The insider said:

“She was a bit careless with the guns, waving it around every now and again. There were a couple times she was loading the blanks and doing it in a fashion that we thought was unsafe.”

She also allegedly loaded it on the set’s pebbled ground, which could be extremely dangerous, and didn’t double check the gun before handing the firearm to the child:

“She was reloading the gun on the ground, where there were pebbles and stuff. We didn’t see her check it, we didn’t know if something got in the barrel or not.”

We hate to think what could have happened if the gun wasn’t properly loaded…

Before the fatal shooting, Gutierrez-Reed actually confessed to feeling unsure about the job when offered The Old Way job due to her inexperience in an interview with the Voices of the West podcast. After these claims, it’s no wonder why! She expressed:

“It was also my first time being head armorer as well. You know, I was really nervous about it at first, and I almost didn’t take the job because I wasn’t sure if I was ready, but, doing it, like, it went really smoothly. The best part about my job is just showing people who are normally kind of freaked out by guns how safe they can be and how they’re not really problematic unless put in the wrong hands.”

Man, that did not age well at all…

Speaking with TheWrap, Brumbaugh ultimately blames movie producers for continuously putting inexperienced people in important roles in order to save money:

“The tragedy is it boils down to the producers. Been happening more and more. As producers refuse to bring more experienced people because their rates are higher, they demand we take our time and (producers) don’t want to pay it. So they hire a newbie who is energetic and wants the job and will do it with less people.”

In terms of the Rust accident, he also believed the tragedy could have been avoided if Gutierrez-Reed actually had some help on the set:

“The problem is she didn’t have help. I would have had minimum two more people. She was doing everything by herself in that movie and on the other movie. If there was one more person in the other movie the tragedy wouldn’t have happened. Second person would have inspected to make sure barrels were clear.”

The more we find out about this incident, the more we become sure this could have been prevented. What are your reactions to the latest details in the Rust tragedy? Let us  know in the comments (below).

[Image via WENN/Hannah Gutierrez-Reed/Facebook.]