Good summary of a lot of newish information in this video. Also makes some good points. As many have already stated, it does seem like there was
severely lacking safety protocols on the set. Live ammo on set, prop gun used after hours with real ammo shows lack of control of the prop, no one checking status of gun, inexperience/negligence.

(Sorry, this video was posted earlier so i deleted it)
My opinion/guesses: Whether Alec should have checked it himself is a good question to come up. Not sure if that will hold up in court because there may be no legal requirement for the actor to double check a prop gun handed to him by a "qualified" person. Definitely would have been a life saving practice here. I question whether most actors would know what to check so it would require actors to get some basic firearm handling training (not prop gun handling, real training like an NRA class) which would be a great thing actually. Now, if there was no "qualified person" on set, that is a separate issue. I imagine that sometimes a scene may require the actor to handle a gun in a manner that violates at least two rules so I won't personnally bring that up as a primary cause. Because of this assumption, they gotta be damn sure it is unloaded. Maybe there is such a thing as a non-functional prop gun (

) that they could swap in and out of the scene and edit at the end but that seems a little impractical. Again, just guessing.