22/09/2026
To Prevent School Shootings, Look Beyond Quick Fixes to Root Causes
By Dr. Victor R. Aguilan
COTESCUP Board Member
The recent tragic shooting at Banga National High School in South Cotabatoโleaving three students dead, including the sixteen-year-old perpetratorโhas once again thrust our nation into grief and alarm. In the immediate aftermath of such violence, public officials naturally scramble for swift interventions. Calls to ban social media for minors, deploy police patrols outside campus gates, and conduct bag checks at school entrances dominate the headlines.
While well-intentioned, these proposals treat the communication medium and physical perimeter rather than the underlying crisis. If we genuinely wish to protect our children and build peaceful, safe learning environments, our national policy must align with empirical research. We must prioritize a comprehensive strategy focused on four proven pillars: monitoring leakage through threat assessment, enhancing mental health programs, enforcing secure firearm storage, and reducing teacher workload.
1. Intercepting Crisis Before It Escalates: Monitoring "Leakage"
Research on targeted school violence consistently shows that attacks are rarely committed without warning. In many cases, perpetrators display observable warning signsโoften described as โleakageโโbefore an attack. They may express violent ideas, communicate threats or intentions online, or disclose their distress and grievances to peers.
The recent tragedy in South Cotabato appears to have involved warning signs as well. Reports indicate that the young gunman left notes expressing deep distress and had reportedly given troubling hints to classmates. Simply banning social media will not eliminate the underlying crisis. It may instead displace troubling communications to less visible digital spaces, making early detection more difficult.
Rather than relying primarily on digital restrictions, schools need multidisciplinary behavioral threat assessment and management teams composed of administrators, guidance counselors, mental health professionals, teachers, and appropriately trained student-affairs personnel. Their purpose should not be to criminalize troubled students but to identify concerning behavior, assess risk, and connect students with appropriate support before a crisis escalates into violence.
2. Strengthening Mental Health and Relational Safety
A threat assessment framework is only as effective as the support system standing behind it. Mass targeted violence in schools is almost always preceded by severe personal crisis, acute grievances, and unaddressed trauma.
Placing police officers at school gates or conducting searches by barangay tanod may offer a visible sense of control, but studies show these measures do little to deter internal student shooters. In fact, excessive "target hardening" can heighten anxiety and erode trust. True security relies on relational safety. We must significantly expand our guidance and counseling services in public schools, ensuring that every learner has access to qualified mental health professionals. When students feel seen, heard, and supported by adults in their institutions, the "code of silence" breaks, and peer distress is reported early.
3. Securing the Means: Enforcing Safe Gun Storage
Addressing the psychological and social drivers of violence is vital, but a young person in crisis cannot carry out a shooting without access to a firearm. Research on school shootings involving minors has repeatedly shown that fi****ms are often obtained from the home of the perpetrator or from relatives and other familiar sources. In the Banga incident, reports indicate that the firearm used belonged to a parent.
We must therefore treat firearm ownership as a profound civic responsibility. Legislative and policy efforts should strengthen safe-storage requirements and measures designed to prevent unauthorized access to fi****ms by children and adolescents. Gun owners must be held accountable for securing their weapons so that minors cannot readily obtain them.
Responsible firearm storageโincluding appropriate locked storage and measures preventing unauthorized useโdirectly addresses one of the most preventable pathways through which a young personโs crisis can become deadly violence.
4. Unburdening Our Educators: The Structural Foundation
Finally, any effective school-based intervention depends on the people who interact with our students every single day: our teachers. Educators are the first line of defense in spotting sudden changes in a student's behavior, academic decline, emotional withdrawal, or peer conflict.
However, when teachers are overwhelmed by excessive administrative burdens, oversized classes, and non-teaching chores, their capacity to build meaningful mentor relationships and notice subtle warning signs drops sharply.
Reducing teacher workload, therefore, is not merely a labor issue. It is also a matter of student well-being and school safety. Unburdening educators gives them the time and institutional capacity to know their students better, foster supportive classroom environments, identify emerging concerns, and coordinate effectively with guidance counselors, administrators, and families.
A Call for Lasting Solutions
Preventing targeted violence in our educational institutions requires moving beyond reactive and simplistic solutions. Sweeping social media bans and fortified campus perimeters cannot substitute for early behavioral intervention, accessible mental health and guidance services, responsible firearm ownership, and adequately supported educators.
This does not mean that reasonable physical security measures or responsible digital safeguards have no place in schools. They do. But they should form part of a broader prevention framework rather than become substitutes for addressing the conditions that allow violence to develop.
Our young people deserve learning environments grounded in peace, justice, responsibility, and holistic care. By focusing our national strategy on evidence-informed prevention and addressing problems before they become tragedies, we can help ensure that our schools remain spaces of hope, growth, and genuine safety for every Filipino student.
Dr. Victor R. Aguilan is an ethicist, educator, and writer based in Dumaguete City.
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