EVERY Filipino parent expects that when they send a child to school in the morning, that child will safely come home in the afternoon.
Unfortunately, the incident at San Jose National High School in Tacloban City shattered that assumption.
Schools are supposed to be sanctuaries of learning, not scenes of mourning. Yet within minutes, classrooms became crime scenes, families were left with unimaginable loss, and Filipinos confronted a painful realization: School shootings are no longer tragedies that happen only somewhere else.
Our first reaction is naturally one of anger. We ask who should be arrested, who should resign, and what punishment should be given to those responsible for the tragedy. And to be fair, those are truly legitimate questions.
But they are not the first questions we should ask.
The first question should be this: How did we allow this to happen?
That is the question public health asks. It shifts the conversation from punishment to prevention, from reacting after lives are lost to preventing violence even before the first shot is fired.
For decades, we have treated gun violence primarily as a law enforcement issue, and so we respond accordingly. Deploy more police. Tighten security. Impose harsher penalties. Conduct investigations. Necessary, yes, but reactive. They begin only after someone has already pulled the trigger. After innocent people have been turned into victims.
Public health begins long before a gun is fired. It asks what conditions allowed violence to grow, and what interventions might have prevented it altogether. That approach has transformed how societies confront infectious diseases, traffic fatalities, smoking and even the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Why should gun violence be any different?
The Tacloban tragedy is not simply a story about two minors carrying firearms into a school. It is equally a story of adult responsibility, access to guns, family supervision, bullying, school preparedness, mental health, and a society that too often normalizes violence as an acceptable response to conflict.
Children do not manufacture that culture. They inherit it.
Perhaps one disturbing aspect of the case is the reported source of the firearms. If minors were able to obtain weapons from adults legally entrusted with them, which in this case is a police officer, then this is not merely juvenile delinquency. It’s a failure of adult accountability. Prevention should have begun there.
Before public attention to this matter fades, the government should conduct a nationwide audit of firearms issued to police officers, military personnel and licensed security agencies. Safe firearm storage should become a legal responsibility, not simply a personal preference. And when children gain access to legally owned firearms, accountability should naturally extend to the adult who failed to secure them. We should keep in mind that public safety begins not with more firearms, but with responsible stewardship of those already in circulation.
The conversation must also move beyond metal detectors and armed guards. Schools regularly prepare students for earthquakes, fires and typhoons. Now, they should also be equipped to recognize the warning signs of targeted violence through multidisciplinary threat assessment teams composed of educators, counselors, psychologists, social workers and law enforcers.
Bullying must no longer be dismissed as a childhood rite of passage. Persistent humiliation, social isolation and online harassment leave wounds that are invisible but real. Most children who are bullied never become violent. Many suffer in silence. A very small number strike back. Prevention means reaching them before despair hardens into violence.
There are already calls to blame video games or social media for this issue. While they deserve study, they should never become convenient scapegoats. Public policy must follow evidence, not panic. Easy access to firearms, poor supervision, untreated psychological distress and fractured family relationships remain far more consistent predictors of violent behavior than brutal pixels on a screen.
We also need a national violence surveillance system linking the Department of Health, Department of Education, Department of the Interior and Local Government, Philippine National Police, Department of Information and Communications Technology, and the Department of Social Welfare and Development together. This system would allow authorities to identify patterns of violence, detect communities or populations at greater risk, evaluate whether prevention programs are working, and allocate resources where they are needed most. It would also provide policymakers with evidence to craft interventions based on real trends rather than isolated headlines. Public health begins with good data. What is not measured cannot be effectively managed.
This tragedy has revived calls to lower the age of criminal responsibility. That debate has its place. But it addresses what happens after a child commits an unspeakable act. Public health asks what could have been done six months or even six years earlier. Punishment looks backward. Prevention looks forward. And in this case, it’s better than a lengthy prison sentence.
As a former legislator, I have seen how quickly laws are written in the heat of public outrage. Anger is a powerful political force, but it’s rarely a reliable architect of lasting policy. The harder task is to enact reforms that quietly prevent tragedies from ever making the headlines since they never occur in the first place.
Every morning, millions of Filipino parents entrust their children to schools believing that education will enrich their future, not end it. That trust is sacred. That is not an unreasonable hope. It’s the most basic promise any society owes its children.
If the Tacloban shooting becomes only another headline, we will have failed those families twice: first by allowing the tragedy, and then by learning nothing from it. But if it compels us to confront gun violence not only as a criminal justice issue but as a preventable public health challenge, then their loss may yet protect children we will never know.
In public life, we often ask who is to blame after lives are lost. The better question, which truly honors the victims, is whether we had the courage to prevent the next tragedy before it happened.
As Nelson Mandela said, “There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
