Two school shootings involving minors in barely two months should make us ask questions that go much deeper than school security.
After the latest incident, I cannot stop thinking especially about the children who were inside those classrooms—the students who heard the gunshots, saw their classmates scrambling for safety, and witnessed a fellow student firing at a teacher and other students while livestreaming what he was doing. Some of them may carry those images for a very long time.
They will need care. Their teachers and parents will need care too.
We normally speak of PTSD therapy after traumatic events. But perhaps we also need to start speaking about another kind of therapy—not only for these particular children, but, metaphorically speaking, for our whole society.
A kind of NATIONAL THERAPY.
I say this because children do not grow up in a vacuum.
Many Filipino children who are teenagers today spent part of their childhood during the years of the violent drug war. They heard violent language coming routinely from people in authority. They saw television reports and newspaper photographs of bodies riddled with bullets, sometimes left uncovered on streets and sidewalks. They heard adults casually say, “Okay lang iyan. Adik naman. Kriminal naman. Deserve niya iyan.”
For years, violence became part of the ordinary scenery of Filipino life.
I am not suggesting that the drug war “caused” these school shootings. Psychology rightly warns us against simplistic explanations. Youth violence almost never comes from one factor alone. Bullying by itself does not turn a child into a killer. Neither do violent games, mental illness, social media or family problems by themselves. Serious violence usually develops from a complicated interaction of grievances, relationships, environment, access to weapons, psychological vulnerabilities and social influences. (Inquirer.net)
But this does not mean the larger culture is irrelevant. The World Health Organization recognizes that children who are repeatedly exposed to violence can suffer lifelong effects and can face a greater risk later of becoming victims or perpetrators of violence themselves. It also identifies social norms that normalize violence as one of the societal conditions that increase the risk of violence. (World Health Organization)
That should make us think.
Violence seldom begins with the pulling of a trigger. Long before the gunshot comes the image. Then perhaps the grievance. Then the fantasy of getting even. Then the words. Then the threats. And finally, when circumstances and access to deadly weapons make it possible, the action.
This is why bullying deserves serious attention—not because every bullied child becomes violent, but because humiliation and unresolved resentment can sometimes fester unnoticed. A young person may withdraw, nurse fantasies of revenge, post threatening messages, or begin imagining violence as the only remaining way of recovering dignity.
The answer cannot simply be: Expel the problem child. Sometimes the child threatening violence is himself a child in serious distress.
Schools therefore need not only guards and metal detectors but trusted adults, counselors, confidential ways for students to report threats and bullying, and trained teams capable of recognizing a developing crisis before it explodes. Research on school violence increasingly emphasizes precisely this kind of early, multidisciplinary intervention. (National Institute of Justice)
And parents who own firearms must understand the enormous responsibility involved in keeping them completely inaccessible to children. In the two recent Philippine school shootings, authorities reported that the young perpetrators had obtained firearms connected with adults or relatives. (Reuters)
But I keep returning to the larger question: How do we help a whole society recover its instinctive revulsion toward violence? Perhaps this is where our national therapy must begin.
We need to learn again that a human being does not cease to possess dignity because he is accused of a crime. We need to stop laughing when leaders threaten to kill people. We need adults to stop teaching children—sometimes without realizing it—that cruelty is strength, that humiliation is leadership, that vengeance is justice, or that some lives are disposable.
We need media and social-media users to think twice before repeatedly circulating horrifying footage that can retraumatize survivors and turn acts of violence into spectacles. Trauma specialists specifically advise limiting children’s repeated exposure to disturbing images after violent incidents. (NCTSN)
We need to teach our children how to deal with anger without converting anger into hatred; how to respond to humiliation without imagining revenge; how to seek justice without becoming unjust themselves. And perhaps we adults need to learn those things again too.
My brother Randy recently wrote about what he calls a “constituency of resentment”—the legitimate resentments produced by inequality and exclusion which political figures can learn to exploit. Resentment itself is not evil. Often there are real wounds underneath it. But resentment can either become energy for justice and reform, or it can be manipulated into contempt, vengeance and violence. (Randy David)
A wounded society therefore needs more than punishment. It needs healing. It needs truth-telling and memory. It needs justice for victims. It needs spaces where anger can be spoken before it turns into hatred. It needs schools that teach empathy and conflict resolution. It needs families where children learn that strength does not mean domination. It needs public officials who understand that their words educate the nation whether they intend them to or not.
Pope Leo XIV says it beautifully in Magnifica Humanitas: “Let us disarm words and we will help to disarm the world.” He speaks of rejecting the “war of words and images” and asks us to examine the aggression—explicit or implicit—that enters our language. (Vatican)
Perhaps that is where our national therapy must begin:
DISARM THE IMAGES.
DISARM THE THOUGHTS.
DISARM THE WORDS.
DISARM THE HANDS.
And after every act of violence, recover enough humanity to say—with conviction, and not merely as a slogan: NEVER AGAIN.
