Two Victims Dead and Eight Injured in Latest School Shooting in the Philippines

Earlier today, a 16-year-old student at Banga National High School in South Cotabato in the Philippines sat down next to his friends at lunch and told them to head home, because after lunch he’d be “executing his plan.” They laughed. The kid was known as a joker, the kind of dry-witted class clown you’d never peg for the shooter, so nobody took him seriously until he walked into the classroom next to his and started firing. He hit ten students, reloaded once, and then turned the gun on himself, taking the coward’s way out. Two students, both 14, were killed.

In America, these kinds of threats are being reported more often now because we’ve been dealing with these kinds of ‘jokes’ for 27 years now. In the Philippines, this is a relatively new phenomenon.

The gun was his dad’s, who is both a Department of Education employee and a member of a local gun club. That means this kid grew up with a father who spent his professional life around schools and his hobby time around firearms.

The 9mm handgun was said to be locked in a vault, but the shooter got into it anyway. If history with these cases is any indicator, “vault” is probably being used in the loosest terms possible. I’d bet real money it wasn’t the Fort Knox mental image the word conjures. Kids break into these things constantly, and it’s rarely because they’re criminal masterminds. It’s typically because the adults who own guns consistently overestimate how secure “locked” actually is.

But let’s kill one narrative before it takes root. Reports say the kid wasn’t bullied. Bullying isn’t a required ingredient for a school shooting, and it never has been. Treating it as the default explanation lets a lot of other rot go unexamined.

There’s also a secondhand claim floating around that a teacher on video insisted there were two shooters, with a student pushing back that they were “outsiders.” I wouldn’t put much stock in it. Chaotic scenes generate exactly this kind of confusion almost every single time. Panicked witnesses see a fleeing figure and assume it’s the attacker or catch a glimpse from two different angles and swear they saw two different people. It happens in nearly every mass shooting with more than a handful of witnesses, and it rarely survives contact with an actual investigation.

More interesting to me is that his mother wanted to get him to a psychiatrist. We don’t know why that didn’t happen, but I’ve read enough of these cases to have a guess, and it rhymes with every American shooting where a mother raised the alarm and a father waved it off as overreacting. Denial is not a uniquely American trait, but the specific shape of “my son doesn’t need a shrink, he needs to toughen up” sure has an American accent to it.

Which brings me to the question I’ve been asking since the start of the three Philippine school shootings. Is this another American import school shooting? Absolutely it is.

The shooter was reportedly active in the so-called True Crime Community, or TCC, an online subculture that’s less a fandom and more a farm system for mass violence. Kids trade gore content and worship past school shooters. More concerning is that they occasionally produce a member who decides it’s their turn to get their name added to the long list of losers.

It’s the same pipeline that’s radicalized shooters across the US for years now, and watching it show up as the connective tissue in all three Philippine school shootings tells me the export business is thriving. I have to wonder whether the Philippines has become fresh soil for American TCC adherents to cultivate, a new market for the same recruitment they’ve been running domestically since Columbine became a religion instead of a tragedy. Because that’s really what this is when you strip away the specifics.

Since Columbine, most school shootings have been imitations of Columbine, and this shooting imitates the two Philippine shootings before it, which themselves imitated the American original. That makes this a copy of a copy of a copy, and somewhere down that chain of degraded photocopies, the actual “why” gets lost entirely, replaced by nothing but the aesthetic of the thing.

Here’s the thing that future Philippine school shooters should know. As far as I can tell, none of these three Philippine shooters have had their names released. If the goal was infamy, if they wanted to be added to the TCC Hall of Shame alongside the the shooters they’re idolizing, it isn’t working. At least not yet.

So here’s a thought for anybody reading this who’s found their way into that same dark corner of the internet looking for a shortcut to being remembered. You can still make a name for yourself. Just do it by fixing something in your community instead of ending lives in it. That’s a real legacy. What this shooter did was just cowardice.

(Sources)