Violence did not begin in that classroom

The school shooting in Tacloban last Monday cannot be reduced to one or two causes. Easy and emotional explanations are precisely what we should resist here.

- Ian Vincent Manticajon

It was not just GoreBox, the online video game. It was not just bad parenting. It was not just loose firearms. It was the convergence of many ugly things we should never have allowed to meet in the mind and hands of a child.

First, let’s take the online environment. We still do not fully understand what constant exposure to violent images, violent language, and violent games does to young minds. Before social media, children were mostly exposed to the people around them, their family, classmates, neighbors, teachers, and immediate community. Their world was easier to control because it was also more personal.

Today, a child can be exposed every day, even without adults knowing, to online influencers, trolls, anonymous cruelty, and disinformation channels designed to inflame hearts and manipulate minds.

Second, there was the gun. Online fantasy becomes deadly when it finds a weapon in the hands of a child who has not yet understood consequences. When those firearms fell into the hands of minors last Monday, something had already failed long before they pulled the trigger.