Shootings and Shoutings

A retired principal once asked a currently employed DepEd teacher, “Anong measures nindo sa school kayan ngunyan?” (What are your safety measures in school these days?)

The teacher replied, “Pinapadara po hard hat saka whistle ang mga aki baka sakali po maglinog.” (We require the children to bring hard hats and whistles in case an earthquake hits.)

The retired principal bluntly retorted, “Dai. Iyan sa baradilan sa eskwelehan.” (No. I mean for school shootings.)

That exchange hits hard. It forces an uncomfortable realization: What measures are our schools actually taking to prevent violent tragedies, like the shooting that just shook Tacloban?

Have you tried visiting a public elementary or high school lately? It is shockingly easy to enter, roam around, and walk straight into any classroom. All you have to do is tell whoever is at the gate that you need to deliver something important to a student or visit a teacher, and you're in.

While a select few schools can afford professional security guards, the vast majority cannot. For these underfunded institutions, the role of "gatekeeper" informally falls on utility workers who are already stretched thin with cleaning duties, parents and guardians loitering around waiting for dismissal, and/or street vendors selling snacks and school supplies along the fences.

This security gap isn't just a theoretical threat. Recently, a large elementary school suffered a series of thefts perpetrated by an outsider. He simply walked onto the campus, roamed the corridors, and scouted for items to steal. No one suspected a thing because everyone assumed he was a parent, a teacher's relative, or a new utility worker.

To combat this, some schools implement systems like a "Fetcher’s ID"—a card bearing the school logo and signed by the principal. But in reality, this system is easily compromised. What happens when an uncle, neighbor, or older sibling comes to pick up the child because the mother is away? A guard cannot reasonably withhold a child from their own family. Likewise, many independent students are trusted by their parents to commute home alone. Once these exceptions become the norm, the system’s reliability is shot.

As it stands today, entering a public school campus is as effortless as walking into a public market—and that should terrify us all.

I never thought we would come to this point. School mass shootings used to be viewed as a uniquely American crisis. Do we really want to add this to our already overflowing pile of national problems? Are poverty, government corruption, plummeting literacy and proficiency, substandard infrastructure, and devastating natural disasters not enough that we now have to insert classroom massacres into the mix?

Where did these kids get the idea of coming to class with guns blazing?

The grim reality is that they are copycats. The Tacloban school shooting has effectively become a localized sub-category branching out from the historical American bloodlines of Columbine, Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Robb Elementary.

Worse, this violence isn't isolated to firearms. Coinciding almost exactly with the Tacloban tragedy, a wave of stabbing incidents involving teenage students erupted in both private and public schools in Cavite. Curiously, the common thread between the Tacloban shooting and the General Trias stabbing is the perpetrator’s age of 14, and the chilling premeditation involved in inflicting maximum pain on helpless schoolmates.

What is going on with teenage campus violence in June 2026? Is this a trend, or something deeper? I remember how the youth-led protests in Nepal, Indonesia, and our own local demonstrations against corrupted flood control projects all erupted in a synchronized wave between August and September 2025. Without sounding superstitious, it seems that during certain periods in history, unrelated groups of people are simultaneously pushed toward radical expression—whether through political protest or, in this case, sudden, localized violence.

Now, authorities are looking at banning violent video games like GoreBox to prevent future shootings and stabbings. Honestly, I doubt that will be effective. Back in the day, teenage boys went out of their way to access banned contraband, porn magazines, liquor, and drugs despite strict prohibitions. If a kid wants to access violent or explicit content, they will always find a workaround. Let's be honest: almost all of us have bypassed a rule like that at least once in our youth. Banning a mobile app feels like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound.

Ultimately, violence exists in human nature. It is not the digital screen that creates the malice; the screens merely provide the blueprint. The real challenge rests on our society's ability to control and confine that darker side of human nature. We must learn to govern it everywhere—whether it is protecting our children in the classroom, or controlling the volatile crowds rioting in the streets in support of a plunder-accused senator.

Genesis 6:11: “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence.”