There are two elements that people are considering here: the physical act of firing the gun, and his liability for Gutierrez-Reed's negligence, as the Producer holding responsibility for hiring.I'm afraid I don't follow your logic. What makes the charge appropriate in this case is that as the person who fired the shot, Baldwin is culpable for the resulting death despite the lack of intent. Of course they wouldn't level the same charge against Baldwin if he hadn't have been the one who fired the shot, because charging him with it is predicated on that fact. That it wouldn't have been appropriate to level that charge against him if he hadn't been the one to shoot is irrelevant, however, because that's not what happened.
It's like asking if someone would still have gotten a DUI if they hadn't been driving while drunk. Of course a DUI wouldn't be appropriate then, but that doesn't matter because they were driving drunk. The charge is kinda predicated on the circumstances as they occurred.
The point of my "if he didn't fire the shot" scenario wasn't just to offer a counterfactual where the whole offence didn't occur. It was to separate those two elements, because I feel like they're getting muddied together. If we're considering those actions (the hiring and the firing) individually, what's the level of responsibility on each?
#1: I don't think responsibility rests on Baldwin for firing the shot. He had every reason to believe it was empty, having been told so by 2 professionals. He couldn't be expected to just assume neither of them had done their jobs.
#2: I do think responsibility rests on Baldwin for hiring somebody negligent. But that liability doesn't reach manslaughter. People are reaching for manslaughter because they're wrongly mixing the two actions into one: considering the negligence of #2 as the direct cause of the damage caused by #1. But it's not.