Opinion, 1221 WYBJ, Vol. 44 No. 6. 14
| Author | Khale J. Lenhart |
| Position | Vol. 44 6 Pg. 14 |
We Need to Be Better in the Face of Tragedy
Khale J. Lenhart
Hirst Applegate, LLP Cheyenne, Wyoming
The news for several weeks has been awash with coverage of the accidental shooting death of Halyna Hutchins, a cinematographer working on a western film with Alec Baldwin. The precise facts of how and why a live round ended up in a prop gun are still not entirely clear. What we do know is that, in a rehearsal, Alec Baldwin fired a gun that he had been told was “cold” - meaning that it did not have live rounds in it - but that actually contained a live round. When he fired the gun containing the live round, it struck Halyna Hutchins and director Joel Souza. Hutchins died later that day.
In the wake of this tragedy, some of the worst parts of our society came forward. Jokes were made about Alec Baldwin and the shooting death, largely based around his well-known liberal political beliefs. Donald Trump Jr. even began marketing a shirt saying “Guns Don’t Kill People. Alec Baldwin Kills People.” The schadenfreude displayed by some conservatives over Alec Baldwin being involved in a shooting death was one of the low points of our recent times.
What those making light of the situation forget - or worse, deliberately ignore - is that the incident involved real people. I knew Halyna Hutchins. Not well, but her husband and I were law school classmates. Halyna and my wife Sarah got to know each other relatively well while we were in school, as we were all parts of the relatively small community of married students at Harvard Law School. I remember her as being very pleasant and having a fascinating background and ambitions. She was from the Ukraine and met her husband while she was in the United States on a student exchange. If I remember correctly, I believe she was working as an entertainment journalist at the time, and she had ambitions of going to California to work in the movie industry. After we graduated and our paths no longer crossed, I still got to see snippets of her life through Facebook. I saw when she and her husband had their son. I followed along as she began working on films and rooted for her from afar as she began working on more prominent movies with more prominent actors. Occasionally, her husband and I would interact on Facebook - a comment or like on particularly poignant or significant events, although I would be exaggerating to say we were...
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