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: