By Carl Anthony R. Calumba
On an ordinary school morning in Tacloban, three students were killed and twenty more were wounded when two of their classmates opened fire inside San Jose National High School, using a .38 caliber revolver and a 9mm Glock 17 pistol. At least 34 rounds were fired, according to the police investigation. The two suspects were 15 and 14 years old, respectively. Both teenagers were arrested shortly after and said they had been bullied.
Three families are now arranging funerals for children who did nothing to deserve what happened to them. Twenty more families are sitting in hospital rooms, waiting to find out what their children’s lives will look like now. Hundreds of students, teachers, and parents carry a trauma that no classroom was ever built to hold. The dead deserved to walk home that afternoon and the wounded deserved a school day that ended the way school days are supposed to end.
What happened inside that school is a heinous crime, and nothing condones it or asks for leniency divorced from consequence. A child does not arrive at violence from nothing. The environment one grows up in does not merely influence behavior, but shapes the entire architecture of how a young person understands the world. A child raised in chronic poverty, surrounded by neglect, exposed to abuse, and denied access to mental health support does not wake up one morning and choose cruelty out of thin air. The soil matters.
This is precisely why the Republic Act 9344, known as the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act, exists, and why weakening it would be a profound mistake. Its amendments do not excuse children from accountability. They demand it, but through a framework that recognizes what the science of child development has long established: minors process consequence, culpability, and cause-and-effect differently from adults.
This framework does not let the offenders escape accountability. Instead, it ensures they are held responsible through measures proven to reduce reoffending. Accountability under this Law is more exacting because it requires the state to address what produced the danger instead of simply removing it from sight. It provides for discernment hearings, diversion programs, and youth rehabilitation centers specifically to make minors answer for their actions, while addressing what made them dangerous in the first place. Removing these safeguards and treating children like adults ignores what research shows works to protect communities. Justice should be measured by what prevents future harm, not by what best satisfies public anger.
Some have pointed to GoreBox, an 18-plus game developed by Germany-based studio F2 Games, after police confirmed one of the two minors was an avid player. Authorities are investigating whether the two minor suspects were influenced by GoreBox and other online content. In response, the Senate Committee on Women, Children, Family Relations, and Gender Equality, chaired by Senator Risa Hontiveros, launched an inquiry into possible online influences. However, Hontiveros clarified that the committee is not blaming a single game for the tragedy and the temporary ban on GoreBox was imposed by a separate government agency.
But, treating one game as the primary explanation risks becoming a deflection. If a 14 year-old is accessing content built for adults, the failure falls on the absence of parental guidance and lack of time and resources to monitor what their children consume online. Parents are not the enemy in this conversation, but they are part of it. Fixating on a single game company ensures that no one with real responsibility, even adults, ever has to answer for anything.
Even parental responsibility exists within limits set by the State, and those limits have been set poorly. The more urgent question is how those children accessed the firearms in the first place. Police confirmed that one of the guns was the service weapon of a police staff sergeant, the aunt of one suspect. The officer was immediately relieved from duty and placed under restrictive custody while facing an administrative investigation for grave misconduct and neglect of duty. This is the pattern: we reach for the youngest, most visible person in a tragedy and call it accountability. Youth violence is not a youth problem. It is a policy failure that expresses itself through youth, in this case, through the deaths of three students who had nothing to do with any of it.
We are a country that has watched children witness Extrajudicial Killings in their neighborhoods. We have seen the bodies of drug suspects left on streets where children walk to school. We have watched dynasts defend police brutality on national television and the officers involved return to duty rather than face proceedings. We have watched a national drug war carried out for years with a body count in the thousands, most of them poor and never given a trial. None of that took place in a courtroom or a policy paper written for adults to read later. It took place on the streets, the news, the timelines of a generation of Filipino children who grew up watching it happen in real time, unfiltered and unexplained.
That is normalization in practice. It does not require a child to be told directly that killing is acceptable. It only requires that they watch it happen, without consequence, by the people whose job is supposedly to protect them. They ‘learn’ that some lives are disposable, violence from authority is justice, and power answers to nothing. A state that models this for years cannot then act surprised when a fraction of that lesson resurfaces—distorted and misdirected—in a school hallway. We cannot saturate the environment of childhood with that message and then express shock when violence becomes a language some children eventually reach for.
The Weekly Sillimanian urges educators, parents, policymakers, and communities to look beyond calls for harsher punishment and confront the deeper conditions that make these acts of violence possible. Meaningful solutions require more than just reaction. They require sustained investment in safe schools, accessible mental health support, responsible governance, and environments.
As the nation mourns, we must resist the temptation to reduce this incident to a question of individual culpability alone. The lives lost in Tacloban demand a broader reckoning with the systems and social realities that shape Filipino youth. If we are committed to protecting children, then we must be equally committed to building a society that values their safety, dignity, and future, even before tragedy strikes.
