The successful assassination attempt on former Lamitan City Mayor Rose Furigay has also been described as a “mass shooting”, which is a technically correct description of the incident, since the gunman, 38-year-old Chao Tiao Yumol from Lamitan, Basilan killed three people when he opened fire during a graduation ceremony at the Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City.
Maybe it’s just me, but when I hear the word “mass shooting,” I immediately think of USA-type massacres where a crazy gunman indiscriminately kills random people with a military-type assault rifle that is legally acquired because Americans have this weird right to bear deadly arms even in peacetime.
If you come to think of it, the only thing Sunday’s event has in common with American-style mass shootings is that it took place in a school because if we define the attack properly, it would be described as an assassination where the shooter had only one target and those who were shot were either beside the target for liquidation or responding to the shooter.
Former mayor Furigay was the intended target of the heinous attack that also hit her daughter Hannait, Furigay’s executive assistant identified as Victor George Capistrano, and Jeneven Bandiala, an Ateneo security guard who was probably responding to the shooting instead of running away from it. No random people were shot and the high casualty rate could be attributed to the inexperience of the assassin, who apparently moonlights as an online troll.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is that while the shooting is a harrowing and worrying incident, it is not as scary as the American-style mass shootings that have given me nightmares given our propensity to idolize and imitate everything American.
I don’t know what it is about Americans and their brand of mass shootings, but so far, it seems to be an isolated problem of the USA. If it gives any comfort, we don’t randomly kill people here in the Philippines. Gun deaths are usually the result of assassinations, regardless of whether the victim actually made “nanlaban” or not. Collateral damage is not as bad as random shooting in schools and groceries, where anyone can die from a hail of gunfire. Here, your chances for that kind of death, if you are not targeted for liquidation by either the state or non-state actors, is either because of mistaken identity or proximity to the target. These factors can be attributed to the lack of training and professionalism in the assassin’s guild of the Philippines. This is something the PRC should take a look at.
What is worrying at this point is the increased divisiveness and hate among the Filipino people, which is becoming increasingly apparent in some comments on social media over the Ateneo shooting incident, where some sick and hateful people are actually justifying the shooter’s actions, or even saying it was karma for boatsful people of Ateneo and La Salle where students taught to be think apparently become anti-government for having higher standards and expectations from public officials.
If the hate continues to grow and fester and nothing is done about it, especially by paranoid governments that like to pretend it is always under attack, we may not as safe from American style mass shootings as we think we are.
All it takes is for a couple of crazy, hateful and violent wackos who think that a massacre of anti-government brainwashed students is good for the motherland to have access to loose firearms, which this country has plenty of. It’s a bit of a long shot, since majority of our loose and illegal firearms are “paltik” .38 caliber revolvers and assault rifles are not that accessible. Moreover, the Filipino psyche doesn’t seem to have mass killing tendencies (so far).
However, as we have seen over the past few years, people can be made to think and feel anything these days so we can’t really rule out this potential multiverse of madness.
But, even if we don’t get the American-style mass shootings, living in the Philippines remains a scary proposition after seeing how easy it was for a guy with a grudge to shoot down a former mayor at a graduation ceremony in an exclusive university. Chao Tiao Yumol gunning down Rose Furigay and company is an anomaly considering how it is already an extremely personal version of how killings are done in this country where you don’t have to do the dirty work because assassins are allegedly cheap and human life even cheaper.
In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to pick our poison: assassinations or mass shootings. We’d have a government that makes us feel safe and secure, where ever we may be. Hopefully we get to have that kind of government take control of this country one of these days.*
