Eight victims are dead because a 14-year-old boy shot his grandparents at their home outside Bangkok with his grandfather’s own gun, then walked into Debsirin Nonthaburi School and kept firing until five teachers and staff were dead too, before turning the gun on himself. A 12-year-old girl who was wounded that day died in the hospital the next morning, becoming the last victim added to that count.
In the wake of the shooting, Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul has suspended new gun licenses while a permanent law gets drafted. He’s also ordered tighter oversight of the “welfare gun” scheme that’s let officials buy discounted weapons that keep turning up resold on the open market and set up an amnesty window for people to surrender illegal or inherited guns without facing penalties. The Ministry of Education is rolling out weapon screening at school entrances and more mental health counseling.
On paper, that’s a real response. The trouble is Anutin has been here before. He pushed similar reforms after gun violence in 2022 and again after the 2023 mall shooting, complete with a short-term licensing freeze, import restrictions, and a ban on anyone under twenty using a shooting range. None of it stopped this.
It’s hard not to notice how closely that pattern tracks with what we do here in America, where it’s been twenty-seven years since Columbine and nothing has changed. Thailand is at risk of building its own version of that same cycle. Tough talk right after the funerals, followed by however many years of nothing until the next one forces the same officials to say the same things again.
And now there’s a bullying claim, which a classmate brought up, and I’m not ready to just accept as the explanation everyone seems eager to reach for. If this kid was already fixated on school shootings before anyone started bullying him, then whatever happened to him at school didn’t create the danger; it just handed a fuse to something that was already primed to go off, and that’s a very different situation than a kid getting pushed into violence by his classmates.
Investigators haven’t said which came first, and until they do, I don’t think anyone should be treating “he was bullied” as the tidy explanation it’s being handed to us as. And to be clear, because this always needs saying out loud, being bullied is never an excuse for killing nine people. It might be part of how we got here. It isn’t a justification for where he ended up.
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