ACCIDENTAL gun deaths are not all that common, but stories about them are.

Just this month, you might have heard about the Brooklyn teenager who was killed while playing a video game, or the Florida teenager who was killed when his gun-toting cousin lost his balance on a hover board, or the Michigan woman who was killed on Valentine’s Day by a .45 her boyfriend had left on their bed.

In a country of more than 320 million people and at least as many guns, a handful of such shootings every day does not amount to much, except of course to those involved. Even when they reach into the thousands, as they do most years, unintentional shootings are statistically invisible when viewed against other causes of death and injury.

Yet the stories told of gun accidents echo far beyond each isolated shot. They are tales of misfortune and warning, recounted either as lamentations on the vagaries of fate, or condemnations of carelessness, with hints of schadenfreude when the shooter and the shot are one and the same. We rarely talk about them the way we talk about other accidents, with a wince or a shrug depending on how closely the lives affected resemble our own, but as fables with lessons to impart.

The best examples of this are the worst to imagine.

Just after Christmas in 2014, a young woman in Idaho visited a Walmart with her 2-year-old son. As they made their way through the aisles, the toddler reached into his mother’s purse and drew out a legally concealed 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson handgun. He then fired at his mother from near point blank range.