There is no doubt that what happened at San Jose National High School in Tacloban City on Monday morning, June 22, 2026, gripped the whole nation with fear.
It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that two adolescent boys — one aged 14 and the other 15 — could be capable of such wanton violence without displaying any remorse. It would appear that to the perpetrators, killing three of their schoolmates and injuring 20 others was simply something they were ticking off their bucket list. Based on the initial investigation, they had planned the whole thing meticulously over the course of a month.
They roamed the school grounds looking for their target, but when they failed to find him — or her — they turned their attention to a classroom and fired 34 rounds from a .38 revolver and a Glock 17 9mm pistol. Hence the carnage and the resulting nationwide debate regarding lowering the age of criminal liability.
Perhaps the country still can’t get over the grief of losing two young student-athletes to a tragic drowning during a team-building conditioning exercise in Aurora. Perhaps this is compounded by the fact that no one has been held accountable for their deaths. It’s a feeling of helplessness with which the public is all too familiar, having grown up in an archipelago under the constant threat of typhoons, flooding, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. And that’s just the natural disasters.
Still, some of the reactions to Monday’s fatal incident may be a tad too much. Not that I blame people, of course. It hit close to home because the victims’ lives were cut short before they could reach their prime. And, most importantly, they were someone’s children. In a country that is highly child-centric and family-oriented, where having a child “is the ultimate foundation of the family, viewed as a divine blessing and a lifetime source of purpose,” losing a child “is considered one of the most devastating and unnatural disruptions to the family structure.”
It’s no wonder, then, that public officials are in an uproar. Malacañang condemned the recent school violence as “unacceptable,” with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. reportedly feeling “heartbroken.” The Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) issued an advisory, extending the agency’s deepest condolences to the families of the victims and praying for the swift recovery of those who were injured.
The high command has ordered the Philippine National Police to launch a down-to-the-wire, no-nonsense probe into the incident. No whitewashing, no sacred cows. More than just finding out what went wrong, the police must sit down with the Department of Education and local officials to fix the glaring gaps in campus security before another schoolyard turns into a crime scene.
An exaggeration, perhaps. But again, it’s not every day that a Filipino youth opens fire on his fellow youth. The Philippines is not the United States of America; we do not have a gun culture. In fact, guns are hard to come by, although I’ve always wondered how petty robbers manage to possess them.
At any rate, what happened in Tacloban was an isolated case. Granted, the same DILG advisory mentioned two separate stabbing incidents involving students in Cavite schools right after, but these were not attempted massacres.
Authorities should study the Tacloban case and determine the factors that led to that fateful day. The government cannot and must not come up with sweeping generalizations. Public schools already have their hands full with a lack of classrooms, teachers and school supplies. These need to be addressed first.
At the end of the day, we cannot let one incident become an additional burden to an institution that is mired in problems. Public schools can only do so much when it comes to security and student safety. When a student conspires with another for a month to take a classmate’s life, the target will die by whatever means. The government cannot regulate or control intent.
In the Tacloban incident, it is quite clear that something is wrong with the two suspects. There has to be. And authorities need to find out what it is so that there will be no repeat of this tragedy on our shores ever again.