There are several different types of theatrical firearms for different situations.
"Fake" guns. These are designed to look real but are not operational. For stage use these are the most common. There are prop guns made of rubber for scenes where people get hit with them or "pistol whipped". There are replicas which are designed of plastic and wood and even metal to look great on camera or on stage but don't do anything. There are mechanical replicas which can be manipulated - like a replica shot gun may hinge open realistically to load fake shells, there may be a prop magazine or plastic bullets that can be loaded, the barrel on a revolver might spin. It may even be designed with a flint so it throws sparks when the trigger is pulled, but there is no hammer and no actual mechanism to make it fire if a bullet is loaded, or it may not accept a bullet.
There are also "starter pistols" which operate like a gun but have a solid barrel incapable of throwing a projectile. These are used, as the name suggests, to fire a blank at the start of a race, and are occasionally used onstage when a gun must fire a live blank. If a real bullet is loaded in a starter pistol and fired, it would likely explode in the shooter's hand since the barrel is closed, though I believe actual starter pistols are designed so there's not enough space to load a real bullet with a projectile on it.
These aren't used a lot anymore but there are also "cap guns" - they used to be common as children's toys but aren't any longer. A cap gun cannot fire bullets but is fed with a continuous roll of paper tape with tiny dots of gunpowder and maybe flint? The trigger-and hammer work - the hammer smacks the tape which causes a tiny pop and flash and often a bit of smoke so it looks like the gun fired but no bullets are involved. Often the trigger/hammer action advances the tape so ideally several caps can be popped in succession with repeated trigger pulls...like a pistol. It's even less explosive than those firework "poppers" people can throw on the ground to produce a tiny crack.
Real guns loaded with blanks: usually only used in movies where a gun gets close-ups or you can see down the barrel. A live stage play is likely always going to fake the gunshots or use starter pistols or functioning replica guns with the barrel plugged.
Usually in a stage play with guns, most everyone will carry a non-functional prop gun and the gunfire will be a sound effect. If an actor is going to fire a blank from a starter's pistol or a real gun, they usually carry the fake/prop/replica gun for safety and then swap it for the ready-to-fire one from the prop-master/weapon supervisor right before the scene so the actor is not needing to take special care carrying a gun loaded with blanks through the entire show while acting until the gun will be fired. In my theatrical experience, there is usually ONE person offstage who is allowed to handle any firearm, they will check it with the actor during setup, and do all the safety checks right before the actor accepts it to fire in the show - they actor may or may not have time to do a similar check - but this is why you usually eschew using a real gun in a stage play. The other stage rule is you do not aim any gun - prop, fake, real, or otherwise - directly at another person. If blocking requires you point a gun at someone, it is usually staged so the shooter can "cheat" the gun and actually aim up-stage of the person, so when the gun is fired...even if it is a starter's pistol...it won't throw any blank debris or sparks at anyone. Even if a blank is loaded, it can throw anything that happens to be in the barrel out. And this is enforced even with fake and non-functional stage guns to build good safety habits.
In a long running stage show, you are never ever going to have real bullets on the premises and everyone trusts that. There's no reason.
In a *movie* the logistics are different. In a gun-focused action movie or western there are going to be all kinds of guns, often in closeup, and often they will be fired on camera. They might do a similar thing - fake replica guns for safety when not fired, but in a gunfight scene with everyone shooting, it's cheaper and less hassle to use actual guns and blanks rather than CGI - the blanks create flashes and smoke in camera, the actors respond realistically to recoil and the gun action - they're not just lifting their wrist and thinking "bang". Ideally, everything is blanks and there are no real bullets. However, there are "hero" fake bullets - blanks do not look like real bullets since they don't have the projectile. So in a scene where someone *loads* a gun, they use "hero bullets" - these are complete fake bullets with a projectile but no gunpowder, so even if the hammer in a gun hits them, they do nothing.
A "hero bullet" mishap was what happened with Brandon Lee on the set of THE CROW: They did a scene of someone loading fake hero bullets. Since it was a low-budget movie, the weapon crew were creating their own "hero" bullets by emptying the gunpowder out of real-bullets and clamping the projectile back onto the empty casing. Apparently one of the projectiles came apart from the casing and was left lodged in the barrel when they emptied the hero bullets after a scene and nobody noticed one of them was broken. Then when the gun was loaded with blanks (gunpowder but no projectile) it basically formed an actual bullet. When the blank went off, it shot the projectile that was still lodged in the barrel and hit Brandon Lee, tragically causing his death.
With RUST, it sounds like there was a lot of set misbehavior and a casual lack of care from the weapon master. We're like "why were there bullets on set?" They were likely taking shortcuts - using real bullets instead of bothering with fake hero bullets for loading. There are unconfirmed rumors that during long idle hours waiting for setups, the crew would play around target shooting bottles and cans using real bullets and the same guns they and the actors were handling, and due to this carelessness I can only imagine one of the real bullets wasn't removed after a target shooting or test-firing session and that slipped the attention of the weapon master or whomever was in charge with tragic results.
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