Gun culture
We Filipinos almost brag about how safe it is for Filipino children, pointing to the “rare” incidence of gun violence directed against schoolchildren. It’s easy to brush aside all other reports of violence, including bullying, under which the recent deaths of university varsity basketball players fall.
In fact, university violence against students has become pandemic, legitimized under activities that are described as team building, for example.
The recent cases of a 14- and 15-year-old students being shot to death (with 20 other students injured by gunfire) at the San Jose National High School in Tacloban are warnings that we are normalizing, if not glorifying, school violence.
At the same time, we see a pattern where people are initially horrified, followed by outrage and victim-blaming. Typically, the kids (yes, they are kids) and parents are blamed, including the legislators who lowered the age of liability for student offenders to be brought to trial and jailed.
What we fail to see is the emergence of a gun culture over the years that makes us slow to react to the need for more preventive education and greater controls over gun possession. In the Tacloban case, we find that one of the guns that was used to kill a student actually belonged to a woman working in an agency associated with the police (another account says she was associated with a security agency). Connect the dots to figure out how the gun ended up in the hands of her nephew.
Blame has been pinned on the gunman (gun-boy) playing GoreBox, a graphically violent electronic game, shortly before the shooting, and of course, calls to ban the game. But we’ve seen this in the past when the problem comes from the way we’ve normalized violence itself, giving it positive values around masculinity.
In previous years, there have been reports of fatal shootings within Filipino homes, with a minor able to find a gun in a place the father thought was “safe,” usually an aparador (closet). The minor retrieves the gun, plays with it, and accidentally shoots. In one case, the fired bullet kills the sleeping father.
Over the weekend, I was eating in a restaurant with some young relatives when a uniformed man walked (marched) in with a long arm across his chest. I’ve grown to become anxious whenever I see that, almost always in the Philippines. Foreign friends, usually first-timers in the Philippines, would actually ask me to explain the armed man inside the restaurant, and I’d say the man was probably, yes, probably, licensed to carry the firearm.
Europeans would express shock at how casual Filipinos are about this gun toting. Guns are heavily regulated in most other countries. Two friends have remarked that the long arms were not as anxiety-provoking as pistols, which suggest something sinister being planned, e.g., an assassination.
(The term long-arm is actually used more in the Philippines than in other countries where guns are taken for granted. I realized this three years ago, when I submitted an article to a scientific journal about violence in the Philippines, and one of the editors, a British woman, asked me to explain what the term meant! )
We have a very different cognitive frame for guns and violence, one instilled from childhood. We see guns in a complex scheme of protective defense, more like the anting-anting, an amulet, or talisman. Carrying one around keeps away “bad men” and harm. We almost never think the gun, which is presumed to be loaded, can provoke violence. The armed burglar is more likely to shoot than an unarmed one.
Such images are propagated by mass media and social media, and become part of the glorification of guns, more for boys, to be propagated by fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and the male peer group. I tried to keep my children’s (including daughters) growing up gun-free with great difficulty.
I generally avoid fear tactics as part of child-rearing, but one story always strikes deep into my own kids’ psyche.
My mother’s side of the family was quite pro-gun, so much so that I wasn’t surprised when I found that some of the women were enamored by a “properly feminine” handgun, which was dubbed “señorita” (“miss,” someone unmarried). These señoritas were all properly licensed, small, and easy to carry around, making them look “safe.”
But one Sunday, as we discussed the señorita, I just had to bring up a less-talked about aspect of gun safety. As I mentioned earlier, my maternal side of the family tended to be more pro-gun and one uncle was particularly known for this, keeping all kinds of firearms in our lola’s home, quite large and spacious. The house was a plush mansion in one of Makati’s “villages.”
One warm summer evening, family lore recalls how a kind of fireworks display was set off in the house, starting from one of the rooms where there were guns and ammunition stored. The house burned down like it was New Year’s. No one was hurt (we did lose some beloved pets). Its impact on the clan was mixed, as we continue to see with the way our gun culture evolves.
I never revisited the ruins. I could not bear memories of the family Sundays of our family reunions, now silenced.
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michael.tan@inquirer.net
