Susan’s Notes
By Susan Palmes Dennis
ROCKINGHAM, North Carolina—I’m both saddened and alarmed about this latest school shooting in the Philippines, specifically the Ateneo de Zamboanga school shooting that claimed the life of one victim and the assailant himself.
Just like the Tacloban shooting, the perpetrators had access to guns from their adult guardians/family. In the case of the Ateneo de Zamboanga school shooting, the perpetrator secured the gun from his father who was a ranking port official in Zamboanga City. Details of the case are all over social media, some of which are overtly sensationalized and as such, should be taken with a ton of salt or if you’re salt intolerant, should be ignored completely.
In any case, this latest incident is a troubling development in the Philippine academic landscape because it showed just how exposed our Filipino school children are to undesirable online social behavior and culture. In particular, the Western school type violence that had become the stuff of cinema from Columbine to the Virginia shootings in Aug. 2026–I had to look that up online, including this tidbit that US school shootings average 70 to 85 a year.
Compared to this, Philippine school shootings are still far below though one school related violent incident is one too many for any self-respecting Filipino parent or school official. Of course, the US school shooting statistics shouldn’t be something that Pinoy schools should aspire towards and as a grandparent living in the US, I’m concerned about the safety of the Philippine academic landscape that my grandkids in Cagayan de Oro City now find themselves in.
And the signs or symptoms of Western school violence are there, accelerated no doubt by the easy accessible exposure by school children to social media, specifically online social gaming. And with no active parental supervision, the school kids are left to fend for themselves in navigating the social media landscape which harbors a lot of predators and those with nihilistic, violent tendencies.
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It’s easier for Pinoy school kids to bond over online gaming than actual physical, social contact in schools—hence why the influence of games as tame as Roblox to the more obviously gory, violent first-person shooting style games are now being blamed for these Pinoy school shootings. I’ve got no statistics to support this observation, but some academician better do a comparative study on this in light of the Ateneo de Zamboanga case.
In both the Tacloban school and Ateneo de Zamboanga school shootings, the perpetrators were active online gamers. More importantly however, the perpetrators had easy access to the guns used in the murders. Like I said, the father of the Ateneo shooter is a high ranking port official who should have known better than to allow his son easy access to his guns which were issued for his official functions.
Criminal negligence is the least of the charges that should be leveled at him and the loss of life cannot be measured. So by looking forward, we hope to reasonably expect that school authorities learn something from this. In fact, everyone should learn something from this especially the parents who happen to own guns and are expected to be responsible gun owners. Gun ownership in the Philippines is probably as much debated as it is in the US.
Right now, there should be two pieces of legislation that should be looked into by government to cut down or neutralize this emerging, disturbing development. One is for the full restriction on social media use by underage or minors and the second is a call by Interior and Local Governments Secretary Jonvic Remulla to Congress mandating sanctions on irresponsible gun owners and imposing more restrictions on gun ownership.
I’m all for these two proposals especially on sanctions on irresponsible gun owners who should never be allowed access to firearms in the first place. In the US where I’m staying, gun ownership is being treated as a sacred inherent right based on the premise that individual citizens have a right to protect themselves against any abuse by government sanctioned forces. I’m not going to a debate on that with any of my American friends.
I hope I don’t have to learn about any school violence in my native City of Golden Friendship, namely Cagayan de Oro City. I can only pray that parental vigilance coupled with school, church and local supervision play a part in keeping our schools safe from any predatory, violent minded elements that seek to harm our schoolchildren.
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