Five days ago, an unnamed 16-year-old walked into a classroom at Banga National High School in the Philippines and killed two of his classmates before killing himself. At the time, I wrote that this looked like another American import. The kid had two magazines loaded and used both. He got the gun from his father, a Department of Education employee who also happened to belong to a local gun club, and however locked that supposed vault was, it wasn’t locked well enough.

I also said that this shooting has the fingerprints of the so-called True Crime Community, the online cesspit where school shooters get treated like celebrities and impressionable kids get told that mass shootings are the fastest route to being remembered. I’ve previously called it a farm system for school shooters.

Now, Philippine authorities are doing something American law enforcement has been allergic to for a while. Philippine investigators are actually going after the person who radicalized the Banga High shooter.

Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla has announced they’ve identified and are pursuing a suspected recruiter, someone he says preyed on the shooter’s insecurities and convinced him that committing an atrocity would earn him glory. Remulla didn’t mince words about it either, calling the tactic “a very insidious way of inciting that kind of hate,” and he’s tying it to a pattern investigators have traced through the deep web across Tacloban, Zamboanga, and now Banga. Whatever you think of the specifics, that’s a government treating online radicalization as an actual crime with an actual perpetrator, not just background noise to be forgotten.

Compare that to the United States, where it took roughly two decades after Columbine for prosecutors to finally start charging parents who handed their kids the weapons that ended up in a school hallway. Two decades of watching fathers and mothers walk away without consequence while their sons turned rifles on classmates, and it took that long just to get the most obvious accomplices in the room held accountable.

Now that we’ve finally cracked that door open, it’s time to walk through it and go after the actual architects of this violence: the TCC adherents who spend their time online grooming the next shooter, feeding him a script and a promise of infamy, then stepping back clean while some kid does the dying and the killing for them.

These are the people encouraging and assisting American school shooters in real time, and they deserve the same manhunt energy Remulla’s government is putting into finding their Filipino counterpart.

Instead, too much of American law enforcement’s appetite for chasing “threats” gets spent on people of color and trans kids who never touched a weapon and never encouraged anyone to touch one either.

If we’ve got the political will to finally prosecute negligent parents, we’ve got the will to prosecute the recruiters actually doing the radicalizing. We’re just choosing not to use it on the right targets.

(Source)

• Banga school shooting suspect’s recruiter identified, pursued — Jonvic Remulla