Baldwin has been working in Hollywood for decades. What you think of as gun safety, might just be completely alien to a movie set, where, they do, in fact, point guns at people they don't intend to kill all the time.

Look at the instances of Tom Cruise's blowup over the social distancing on a movie set last year, or Christian Bale's tirade against a crew member on the set of Terminator. In each case the reflexive reaction was to accuse them of being divas and being obnoxious, even when later parsing out the incidents suggests they were right and actually being the reasonable ones in the situation. Even if your take on COVID precautions leads you to disagree with the policies Cruise was enforcing, you can see him as someone who is trying to make it work under onerous and repressive restrictions. But the first call is to jump on them for acting like entitled stars, when in fact, their positions are actually looking out of the regular guys on the set, who don't get anything from having to stand around for unnecessary takes or who are hurt when the production is shut down by germ Nazis.

So I would also bet there is a lot of backlash against the sort of star who checks the prop gun every time, because no one has patience for things that are unnecessary 999 times out of 1000. There is a lot of pressure from the outside world for stars to not stand out in their on-set behavior, to just take what they are given and stop trying to be obnoxiously perfectionist. Also, there is a lot of derision at actors who try to make like they are real-world experts. You'd be the first one jumping down Baldwin's throat if he tried to comment on gun issues based on his long experience of handling prop guns on set. (BTW, have there been any good memes involving "Shome thingsh in heah don't react well to bulletsh" yet? ) I can imagine how the right would respond if (prior to this incident) Baldwin came out after a well-publicized fatal firearms accident to call for more rigorous enforcement of gun safety based on his experiences with blanks and maybe some anecdotes about the time he cleared a prop gun and found a live round.

Baldwin is, strictly speaking, absolutely responsible for his actions, regardless of the environment. But he's also in an environment where there are a lot of pressures on him to not act in a safe manner or to trust that someone else took care of the safety issues. It's absolutely involuntary manslaughter, but it's also nothing more than that. It would be no different if he had stepped on the gas pedal of a car on set that had supposedly been disabled, and ran over a crew member, or flicked the switch on a power tool, was startled when it turned on, and dropped it on someone, causing a fatal injury. There is probably a pretty big intersection of a Venn diagram whose circles are people who would oppose a crackdown on youthful hijinks in cars (as long as they aren't threatening one's property or peace and quiet) and people who cite numbers and rates of automotive deaths as a counter-argument to gun control. Myself included.

At the end of the day, guns are just machines, whose purpose is to exert more force than the human body can unaided and like all such machines, have the potential for fatal accidents, and some times and places, regardless of how careful you should</> be, people just are not.

Also, whether you are in the line of fire of dimwitted actors with "prop" guns or alone in the hotel room of a movie executive, no one made you go to Hollywood! This is what you get. These are the risks you accept for proximity or access to stardom. Everyone seems to think the bad old days are in the past, and Hollywood has been cleaned up. They passed LAWS after that dude was killed filming Ben-Hur. What could possibly go wrong? Roman Polanski was driven out of the country! The industry is safe now!