Give Me the Gun

Using his family’s experience of coming to the United States as refugees from Vietnam, Andrew Lam meditates on the history and future of children who come to the United States as refugees from violent places. In addition to examining the writer’s own life, the essay discusses Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers responsible for the bombs at the 2013 Boston marathon, and considers how success and failure in the United States shapes the refugee children who come to this country.