Melancholy Accidents: America's Long, Sad History with Guns: The New Yorker As a window into human misfortune, #gunfail is hard to beat. The Twitter hashtag, used most persistently and effectively by the Daily Kos's David Waldman (@KagroX), provides a depressingly clear view of the many ways Americans find to accidentally shoot themselves: cleaning guns, dropping guns, "overhandling" guns, allowing guns anywhere near children or dogs. The power of #gunfail (and, when its victims are not children, its black humor) is found in its predictability: today or tomorrow, sure as a cartoon time bomb, there is bound to be another bang. Yet its haunting quality is not merely a matter of the sad certainty of fatal accidents stretching far into the future. It's also about our collective past. We have been failing with guns for so long, there ought to be a way to hashtag history. If we could, a narrative would emerge of a nation that fancies itself created and sustained by guns but that, in fact, sees its people culled by them with unnerving frequency. Most accidental gun deaths come and go with few tears beyond those shed by the next of kin. For people who merely read about them, they become either cautionary tales of innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time (what a pity!), or morality plays depicting the limitless stupidity of strangers (what a moron!). But they are often parables of a sort, and for centuries they were framed in religious terms. The first American gunfail on record seems to have occurred not long after Governor John Winthrop dreamed of establishing a "city upon a hill" in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By the end of the colony's first decade, with the population of Boston growing quickly, it was a fairly common occurrence for a number of ships full of new settlers to arrive from England on any given day. When one of these vessels had trouble finding a place to anchor, a gunner would fire a shot meant to land harmlessly in the water - the colonial equivalent of air-traffic control. Such was the case when three ships arrived from Ipswich in mid-June of 1637, with three hundred and sixty passengers. The first two ships had found their anchorages without difficulty, but the third failed to go where it was directed, and so a shot was fired to guide it to a spot near Castle Island. Gunpowder is an unpredictable substance, however. "The powder in the touchhole being wet," Winthrop noted in his journal, "and the ship having fresh way with wind and tide, the shot took place in the shrouds and killed a passenger." The gunner had fired through the rigging and hit one of the hopeful new colonists - "an honest man," Winthrop said, who had survived the ocean passage only to be shot dead upon arrival. The next day, the governor and magistrates rowed out to view the body and determine how this tragedy had occurred. "Hearing all the evidence," Winthrop wrote, they "found that he came to his death by the providence of God." The colony's gunner had fired neither musket nor flintlock nor Glock nor Bushmaster but a smoothbore cannon. Yet the death he caused marks the start of the long American tradition of accidental mayhem wrought by those weapons. Inadvertent suicides and other firearm-induced injuries were so frequent in early America that a regular report of "melancholy accidents" - the #gunfail of our forebears - could be found in newspapers across the country throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though these reports also took note of drownings and horse-tramplings, guns provided their assemblers with the most pathos per column inch: A melancholy accident happened at Roxbury on Monday last, two young men diverting themselves with the military Exercise, when one of them gave the Word of Command to Fire! the other instantly discharged his piece, not knowing it was loaded, and the ball entered the head of his Companion, Mr. Henry Wilson, Baker, 22, and killed him on the spot. Boston Evening-Post, September 19, 1774 A melancholy accident happened on Monday last at White's Hotel, in Falmouth; a sea-faring lad, who had been in the house a few weeks, was in the kitchen with the servant-girl, where a musket had lain for several months, and no person, from its being so foul and rusty, ever knew that it was loaded; the boy, in exercising the gun, placed it close to the girl's head, when it immediately went off; the contents of which were lodged in the poor creature's head; she instantly expired. The Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, Philadelphia, April 25, 1789 Melancholy Accident... As Nathaniel Ellicott Force was in the act of cocking and raising a gun, it unexpectedly discharged its load, the butt end giving him a violent blow in the bowels. The gun had been heavily loaded, with nearly double the usual proportion of shot, for the purpose of shooting on the wing. Medical assistance was immediately obtained, but proved to no avail. He lived about twenty-four hours after the accident occurred in extreme suffering. The American, New York, July 8, 1831 Varied as the circumstances of these deaths were, they were regarded much as the Massachusetts Bay gunner's deadly misfire had been: acts occurring by the "providence of God," unfortunate but largely unavoidable. Guns were as much a part of American life as the lake in which you might drown or the draft horse that might run you over if you got in his way. Now, as then, we are only momentarily moved by unintentional death by bullet - at least, we are not so moved that any number of accidents has ever led to significant efforts to tighten nationwide gun-control laws. Though inadvertent injuries by firearm vastly outnumber both the mass shootings and attempted assassinations in U.S. history, it has mainly been these higher-profile instances of people being killed by guns that have led to attempts to limit their availability. Just as the Brady Act of 1994 was born of John Hinckley's attempt on Ronald Reagan's life, and as the Gun Control Act of 1968 came in the wake of the murders of J.F.K., R.F.K., and M.L.K., even the earliest attempt to tighten federal firearms regulations would not have reached the floor of Congress if a public figure had not come under direct attack. The so-called Pistol Toting Bill of 1921 languished in committees for years, until a disgruntled constituent carried a concealed weapon into the Russell Senate Office Building and shot Nevada's Charles Henderson in the arm. "The recent shooting of former Senator Henderson," one contemporary account wryly noted, "served to focus the attention of the representatives and senators on the gun carrying habit, which is probably as widespread in the nation's capital as in any city in the country." But maybe this is fitting. After all, the only gun deaths that seem to linger very long in the public consciousness either involve unignorable carnage or happen close to home. Reports of far-off, accidental, small-scale calamities come and go - lacking further spectacle, they hardly seem real in their numbing regularity. Long before #gunfail, the faded headstones of "melancholy accident" victims might have reminded us of a basic fact of life with guns: they don't always do what we want them to. Illustration: Library of Congress.