The death of Brandon Lee occurred in 1993. A S&W model 629 was used as a prop gun. It was loaded with dummy rounds in one scene. This is commonly done on sets when the director wants to show the gun is loaded or wants to depict an actor loading or unloading a gun as part of a scene. Dummy rounds, consisting of a casing with a bullet, inactive primer, and no powder; have the appearance of a live cartridge. On the Brandon Lee set, live primers were inadvertently used. This created a squib cartridge instead of a true dummy round.
The gun was fired in one scene and the bullet lodged in the barrel of that model 629. In a later scene, that same gun was loaded with blanks and fired at Lee. When the blank was fired, the bullet was driven out of the barrel just as if the gun had been loaded with a live round. The result was the death of Lee.
Like most accidents, that was a series of failures. The dummy rounds should not have been assembled with live primers. When the gun was fired with the live primer, the resulting detonation of the primer should have brought the set to a full halt and an inspection of the gun. And the gun should have been inspected, including the bore, before blanks were loaded into the gun.
We don’t know the details of the current event, but I strongly suspect we will find multiple safety failures occurred on that set.