On June 22, 2026, the unthinkable happened in Tacloban City. Two young teenagers, just 14 and 15 years old, walked into San Jose National High School and opened fire on their peers. When the chaos subsided, three students lay dead and twenty others were injured. For a country that has historically watched American school gun violence with a sense of detached horror, the Tacloban tragedy hit like an earthquake. School shootings just do not happen here. Except now, they do.
The response from the government was swift and highly visible. By mid-July, Education Secretary Sonny Angara and the Philippine National Police rolled out the country's first active school shooter drills at Manila Science High School. Teenagers who used to practice earthquake drops and fire evacuations are now learning how to barricade classroom doors with heavy wooden desks, duck beneath windows, and maintain absolute silence while a simulated gunman stalks the hallways.
It is easy to see why the government rushed to implement these drills. They offer a sense of control. They make it look like the authorities are doing something immediate to protect children. But if you look past the theatricality of police officers running through high school corridors with prop weapons, you realize that active school shooter drills are a band-aid on a gaping wound. They do not address how two underage kids managed to plot a mass casualty event for over a month, nor do they fix the staggering lack of basic infrastructure in Philippine public schools.
The day safety shattered in Tacloban
To understand why the sudden push for active school shooter drills feels so reactionary, you have to look at what actually happened during the San Jose National High School shooting. This was not a spontaneous crime of passion. Investigators later revealed that the two teenage suspects spent over a month meticulously planning the attack. They studied the layout of the school, tracked the movements of their targets, and figure out exactly how to smuggle weapons past the front gates.
The weaponry they obtained points to a massive failure in gun safety and adult accountability. One of the suspects stole a Glock 9mm service pistol belonging to an aunt who works as a police officer. The other minor managed to secure a .38-caliber revolver. They walked into a classroom, and within minutes, transformed a normal Monday morning into a nightmare.
A student named Joyancee Separa managed to record a brief, terrifying video inside the classroom as the attack unfolded. The footage showed another student, Chris Lorenz Fabian, bravely trying to hold the classroom door shut to protect his classmates before he was shot and killed. Fabian was posthumously honored for his heroism, but no child should ever have to display battlefield heroism just to survive a math class.
The incident sent shockwaves through the Department of Education. For decades, Philippine campus security focused almost exclusively on preventing petty theft, keeping outsiders from wandering onto school grounds, and managing rowdy students. The threat model completely shifted in a single morning.
Inside the first active shooter drills in Manila
Weeks after the tragedy, the Department of Education decided that the best way forward was to teach students how to hide. The national rollout began at Manila Science High School, where hundreds of students were instructed to treat active shooter scenarios with the same gravity as a natural disaster.
The scene inside the school during the drill was surreal. An actor wearing a dark hoodie walked through the building, mimicking the actions of a mass shooter. Inside the classrooms, teachers and students frantically piled chairs against doors, turned off the lights, and huddled in corners. The Philippine National Police sent local units to coordinate the exercises, asserting that police visibility during these drills would help restore confidence among frightened parents and learners.
Education Secretary Sonny Angara defended the initiative by stating that the country must adapt to new threats, pointing toward online radicalization and the copycat effect driven by social media. The police have even suggested deploying officers to school flag ceremonies to establish a permanent security presence.
While some students expressed a sense of relief that the government was taking their safety seriously, the drills have drawn heavy criticism from teachers' unions and child advocates. The Alliance of Concerned Teachers publically warned that turning schools into militarized zones does nothing to stop the violence before it starts. They are right. Teaching a ten-year-old how to hide under a desk assumes that the system has already failed to keep the gun out of the building.
The glaring security gap that drills cannot fix
The most frustrating part of the national mandate for active school shooter drills is that it ignores the structural decay of the Philippine public school system. Shortly after the Tacloban incident, the Department of Education conducted a comprehensive safety and security audit across 48,000 public schools nationwide. The findings were alarming.
Only 36 percent of public schools in the Philippines have working closed-circuit television cameras and hired security guards.
Let that sink in. Nearly two-thirds of the country’s public educational institutions have absolutely no surveillance systems and no professional security personnel at the gates. In many rural provinces, school security consists of a single elderly watchman or a rotating group of local village watchmen, known as barangay tanods, who are entirely untrained to handle an armed intruder.
Asking a school without a proper fence, let alone a security guard, to execute a flawless active shooter protocol is absurd. The physical infrastructure of many public schools makes barricading virtually impossible. Jalousie windows that cannot be locked, thin plywood doors, and overcrowded classrooms crammed with 50 to 60 students mean that hiding is an illusion. If a shooter wants to get into a classroom, a flimsy wooden door will not stop them, no matter how many plastic chairs are piled against it.
Instead of spending time and resources on elaborate simulation drills that terrify young children, the government needs to fund basic security infrastructure. Every school needs a secure perimeter, a single point of entry, and trained security personnel who know how to screen visitors and spot trouble.
A broken juvenile law and the online radicalization of minors
The Tacloban shooting also exposed a bitter debate surrounding the Republic Act 9344, better known as the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act. Police investigators dropped a bombshell during their post-incident briefings: the two teenage shooters were fully aware of the law. They knew that because they were under 15, they could not be held criminally liable in the same manner as adults. They literally researched the legal loopholes before picking up their guns.
This revelation re-energized lawmakers who have long fought to lower the age of criminal responsibility in the Philippines. Senators have argued that modern teenagers are exposed to sophisticated forms of media and possess a high degree of discernment, meaning the current legal framework protects violent offenders rather than rehabilitating them.
There is also the troubling digital aspect of the crime. One of the suspects was reportedly obsessed with GoreBox, a sandbox mobile game notorious for its hyper-realistic, pixelated violence, dismemberment, and gun physics. While it is lazy to blame video games entirely for real-world violence, the isolation of the pandemic years combined with unmonitored internet access has created a toxic breeding ground for troubled youth.
Schools are completely unequipped to handle the mental health crisis that underpins these acts of violence. The student-to-counselor ratio in the Philippines is abysmal. Most public high schools have thousands of students but only one guidance counselor, who is usually bogged down by administrative paperwork rather than conducting meaningful mental health interventions. The Tacloban shooters planned their attack for a month, yet no adult, no teacher, and no counselor noticed that these boys were spiraling into violent extremism.
Real prevention means fixing the system from within
Active shooter drills give a false sense of security. They make great photo opportunities for politicians who want to show they are taking tough action on crime. But true campus safety requires hard, unglamorous work that goes far beyond hiding in a dark room.
If the Department of Education wants to ensure that Tacloban never happens again, they must shift their focus from reaction to prevention.
First, gun ownership laws must be enforced with zero leniency. The fact that a minor easily stole a police officer's service weapon is unacceptable. Gun owners who fail to secure their firearms must face severe criminal liability if those weapons are used in a crime. Secure storage laws must be strictly policed, especially for law enforcement personnel who bring their service weapons home.
Second, the government must close the funding gap for school security infrastructure. You cannot secure a campus if you do not have guards or gates. Funding must be diverted to guarantee that the 64 percent of schools lacking basic security are brought up to standard.
Finally, mental health support cannot remain a luxury. Schools need dedicated, trained professionals who can identify behavioral red flags, address severe bullying, and intervene before a student decides that a gun is the only way to solve their problems.
Active shooter drills might train a child on how to survive a worst-case scenario. But our collective goal should be ensuring that the scenario never happens in the first place. It is time to stop playing defense and start fixing the broken system that allowed a tragedy like Tacloban to happen.
