The Brooklyn Rail

She died instantaneously. While trying on clothes, a bullet pierced her chest. Her mother was with her in the dressing room at a Burlington Coat Factory in North Los Angeles. The bullet was a 5.56mm, shot from an M16.  It was one of three bullets shot by LAPD officer William Dorsey Jones Jr. At least one of the other two bullets hit his target—an enraged 24-year-old man who had violently attacked other shoppers, mostly women. The girl, Valentina Orellana Peralta, was fourteen years old. She had just arrived in the United States six months earlier from Chile. Her mother held her inside that small room as the rest of the chaos unfolded outside. 

About forty miles south, in Orange County, a six-year-old boy named Aiden Leos, sitting in a car on his way to kindergarten, softly says, “Ow.” His mother, Joanna Cloonan, pulls onto the shoulder of the 55 freeway. A bullet, shot from another car by a 24-year-old in a burst of road rage, traveled through the trunk of Cloonan’s Chevrolet Sonic penetrating layers of sheet metal, plastic, fabric, finally piercing Aiden Leos through the back. He died in a hospital later that morning. 

In Oakland, California, a three-month old toddler named Jasper Wu was killed on I-880 when a stray bullet was shot by one gang member at another.

The list continues. As of September 1, 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive, 207 children under the age of twelve have been killed by gun violence and 479 have been injured. I have no information as to how many of these cases are from stray bullets, but the heartbreak is unfathomable regardless. 

Inside their thin casings, less than 0.032 of an inch thick, all bullets carry an unbearable load of tragedy, but stray bullets fly with a sinister edge of random, indiscriminate death. We never know where they’re going to land and who they’re going to kill. There is no engagement with the shooter, no confrontation, no warning, no proximity, no sight of the victim. I could speculate that most bullets become stray bullets. Stray bullets are the rule and not the exception.

I have two children, almost six and four years old. We currently reside in Vietnam but intend to return to the US. My mother lives alone in Orange County not far from where Aiden Leos was shot. She will finally retire soon and to have her grandchildren near would bring her tremendous joy. But the proposition of staying for an extended period in America seems absurd to my partner, who was born and raised in Vietnam, where nobody owns a gun, where most of the policemen don’t carry guns, where even the soldiers who guard the large government embassies supposedly only have one bullet in their AK-47s, where news of gun violence is almost unheard of. 

But even here, in this land where gun ownership is a non-reality, my children’s schoolmates run circles in their playgrounds, holding twigs and random pieces of plastic, aiming them like guns at one another. It’s a perplexing and troubling mise-en-scene. How do they inherit these behaviors? But in these little theaters of warfare, there are no bullets, just innocent and confused mouths imitating the sound of small explosions. 

In the US, a country where people believe that arming themselves provides protection, stray bullets remind us of the ultimate irony that haunts the gun debate in America: that statistically, the more guns you possess doesn’t mean the safer you are. Death by a stray bullet can happen instantaneously to anybody, anywhere, at any time, regardless if one is armed or not, shot by cops, robbers, gang members, hunters, mass murderers, and random revelers alike. Despite this, banning guns in America still seems an impossibility. Maybe we should learn a lesson from the school children in Vietnam—let them have all the guns they want, just don’t give them bullets. A bullet ban.

In Vietnam, after the end of the war, a complete and absolute ban on guns and ammunition happened very swiftly. A tremendous feat considering that no wars have surpassed the amount of ordnance and fire power that was used during this Cold War conflict—a war that saw the two most deadly modern assault rifles in action for the first time: the AK-47 and the M16.

The war in Vietnam was my father’s first experience with the AK-47. He was shot at by many such weapons wielded by other Vietnamese men and women in this brutal civil war. My father was drafted into the southern Vietnamese army—the side backed by the US. The side that carried the M16s. My grandmother wept an ocean, thinking she would never see her only son again. But my father was fortunate. He didn’t know it at the time, but there were only six months left in the war. He made it back and swore he would never touch another gun.

Seven years later, my father and his young family end up in Dallas, after jumping from one government housing project to another. A degree in petroleum engineering landed him the night shift at a 7-Eleven. Downtown Dallas in the early ’80s was its own type of war, especially for a new Vietnamese immigrant: there was no difference between a Viet Cong and a Vietnamese refugee and America took out its vengeance there. My father was robbed at gunpoint at least once a month. 

Every morning I wondered if I would see him come home as we left for school. One morning he appeared at the doorway a ghost of himself. Last night’s robbery had affected him differently. The store’s management continued to refuse additional protection. Upon suggestions from my uncles, dad bought an AK-47, wielding the gun that he fought against years earlier. His family felt a perplexing and strange sense of relief and anxiety simultaneously.

About twenty years later, I returned to Vietnam to live and work—to understand the complexities of its history and its entanglement in the Cold War. To do this I co-founded a collective called The Propeller Group. With an ambitious idea and generous support from Grand Arts, we found ourselves back in the US working with ballistics engineers near the Aberdeen Proving Ground. After much trial and error, we successfully shot an AK-47 and an M16 at each other and captured the collision of the two bullets inside a block of ballistics gel. It was on the battlefield of another civil war, the American Civil war, that a miraculous object was found. Two bullets shot from opposite sides collided and fused in mid-air—a near statistical impossibility. Our project, AK-47 vs M16, was comprised of twenty-one gel blocks, each containing a unique collision. It was a twisted 21-gun salute, a choreography of misdirection, diverting bullets at one another, forcing them to defy their own functional possibilities, making the impossible possible, a ceremony of loss, a negation, a self-inflicted ban.