Legion Troll
A fine upstanding poster
Inadvertent suicides and other firearm-induced injuries to self and others were so frequent in early America that regular listings of them could be found in newspapers across the colonies and the early republic throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Guns provided the most pathos per column inch.
Stretching through the centuries in which the United States was born and developed, these early reports of rampant firearm mishaps provide us now with a personal view into the lives of those outside history’s spotlight, whose experiences helped shape the soul of the nation.
To judge not only by the content of the reports but by the fact that they were popular enough that they continued in much the same form for nearly two hundred years, the people who read them not only lived by the gun, but were apparently fascinated by the ever present possibility that they would die by it.
While at times recording little more than the names of those involved, gun accident stories—under the headlines “Melancholy Accident” or “Accidental Shooting” (and sometimes simply “Distressing”)—more often took the form of narratives that perfectly captured painful moments in excruciating and efficient detail.
Taken together, they might be seen as a forgotten mode of American storytelling. Though we often associate accounts of life in the colonies or on the frontier with the legends of Washington Irving or the tall tales of the West, the harsh reality of the times can be better seen in reports whose clinical attention to injuries both physical and emotional make them seem torn from the pages of the pulpiest hardboiled noir.
As in crime fiction, there is a certain sameness to many melancholy accidents.
In the florid style of the day, a gunshot not only kills a man but often “puts a period to his existence.” Widows tend to be “disconsolate”; the children of the dead are usually “numerous”; when one brother guns down another during a hunting expedition, it must be noted that they “had always lived in the greatest harmony together,” or else suspicious readers might assume Cain and Abel had settled their score with a shot.
“The instruments of destruction and death are around us wherever we go,” one 1837 accident collector wrote.
If indeed Melancholy Accidents were once our American Danse Macabre, it is worth noting that the music plays on.
We are all gun people now, just as we have always been.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/10/accidental-shootings-in-us-go-way-back.html
