I WAS in class when the videos started circulating.
Not from the news. Not from the authorities. From group chats, messenger threads that move faster than any teacher can respond. Someone said it was in Zamboanga. Someone said it was live. Someone said do not open it. Of course, someone did.
By lunch, the entire school already knew.
A student had walked into a campus in Zamboanga and opened fire. Another student was dead. The gunman, also a student, was dead too. And somehow, impossibly, the whole thing had been livestreamed, like it was just another piece of content meant to be watched, paused, replayed.
We always say this kind of thing does not happen here. That school shootings are an American problem. That our laws are stricter, our culture different, our families closer. And yet this was the second one in two months. The first was in Tacloban, where students were killed and many others were injured.
So something is changing. Or maybe something has been wrong for a long time, and we are only now being forced to look at it.
After Tacloban, the conversation quickly turned to video games. Officials talked about banning violent games, about how children might be copying what they see on screens. After Zamboanga, the same talking point came back, like a reflex.
It is an easy answer. Maybe too easy.
Because if video games were the cause, then every kid who plays them would be dangerous. And most of us do. We log off after matches, after missions, after hours of pretending violence is just pixels. Then we go back to school, to homework, to normal life. The difference between a game and reality is something most of us understand instinctively.
But a gun is not a simulation.
In both Tacloban and Zamboanga, the weapons used were real guns, owned by adults, relatives, parents, people who were supposed to know better. Licensed, legal, and still somehow within reach of minors.
We are told that gun ownership in the Philippines is regulated, that it requires permits, training, and responsibility. But what does regulation mean if a child can still pick up a firearm from a car, a drawer, a bag, and bring it into a classroom?
There is a gap between the law and real life, and it is wide enough for tragedy to pass through.
And then there is the part we do not want to talk about long enough, the internet.
The Zamboanga shooting was not just an act of violence. It was also a broadcast. A performance, in a way, shaped by the knowledge that someone, somewhere, would be watching. That changes everything.
Because it means the violence does not end when the gunshots stop. It continues in every share, every repost, every replayed clip. It spreads into other schools, other classrooms, into ours.
We do not have ratings for social media the way we do for movies. No one stops a 14 year old from seeing something they cannot unsee. No one pauses the algorithm and asks if we are ready for it.
And so we carry these images with us. Into class. Into conversations. Into silence.
Maybe that is why blaming video games feels so convenient. It allows adults to point to something external, something easier to control. Ban a game. Restrict an app. Issue a statement.
But the harder questions stay unanswered.
Why are guns still accessible to children, even when they are legally owned?
Why do warnings about mental health and behavior often come after the fact, never before?
Why is social media, arguably the fastest amplifier of violence, still largely unregulated for minors?
And why does it always take another incident before we ask these questions again?
In school, we are taught that these places are safe. That classrooms are where we learn, not where we hide. But lately, that certainty feels thinner. Not gone, but shaken.
We still show up. We still sit through lectures, submit requirements, laugh with friends. But somewhere in the background, there is a quiet awareness now, that what happened in Zamboanga and Tacloban is no longer unthinkable.
It has already happened. Twice.
And if all we do is argue about video games while ignoring everything else, the guns, the gaps, the screens that never turn off, then we are not really trying to understand.
We are just trying to move on.
Too quickly.
- Dylan Pebbles Rosas
