Anyone remember this one?

"...setting a precedent in the annals of military history, I am the first weapon to have humanitarian reasons for going off..."

said by Professor Barnhouse, after discovering that he has a wild talent for making munitions (including nuclear ones) explode - from a distance. The Army wants to exploit his ability, but he has reservations and winds up fleeing and going incognito, then destroying all the arsenals on both sides (they had wanted him to do it more "selectively"...)

(it might be paraphrased a little; I'm pulling it back from 1956 or so)

--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Report on the Barnhouse Effect

The "going off" meaning exploding would certainly be a candidate for the root of the "getting angry" meaning.