It seems that in some countries, the availability of guns has become a complex problem.
When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated, the fatal bullet was fired from a gun assembled from parts fabricated with a 3D printer. Even with the strictest gun control laws, Japan saw its once most powerful person downed by a gun. In the United States, ever since the Columbine massacre in 1999, many perspectives on gun control have emerged from a variety of fields, disciplines, and political blocs—child psychology, adult psychology, education management, policy reform, the great US arms manufacturing industry, etc., etc.—and yet, school shootings are no longer a rare occurrence.
But sometimes, the problem is also not so complex. In the two recent school shootings in the Philippines, a straight line can be drawn between the shooters and a family member who’s a cop/security officer. The straight line shows the source of the gun. But in both cases, perhaps owing to the earthshaking shock they delivered, many seem to miss out on the story: Kid gets the gun of their cop dad/aunt and fires away.
So why blame everyone else but the police? Worse, how can some people actually suggest involving the police in “tightening the security” in schools when, in both school shootings, the one that’s supposed to be responsible and careful but was in the end not responsible and careful was a police/security officer?
The Filipino vocabulary on guns may be limited, but it’s not that hard to see how the literal smoking guns are registered to police officers. The logic of putting cops in the frontline to counter students holding guns from cops is lost on me. What am I missing here?
As a college professor, I cannot imagine police officers patrolling the hallways where I teach. Sans the theories of Foucault or Bentham, the image of uniformed men and women inspecting bags for paraphernalia they may not even recognize is horrific. Who’s to say the dangers in books are less than the dangers brought by guns? Police/security officers?
And who’s to say that police surveillance in schools bring about safety when they literally bring guns to places where there’s none?
In literature, there’s the term “Chekhov’s Gun,” which means that when a gun appears in a story—more correctly, in a play—it must get fired. Who does the shooting, who the gun is aimed at, who gets eventually hit (if anyone even does), and how this makes a story, are all questions worth asking. A gun is just too striking an image to forget that it immediately asks to fit or play a part in the story. If it doesn’t fit, then why introduce the image at all?
Chekhov’s Gun is one of those seemingly simple rules of storytelling, but it is often irresponsibly tossed around as a factoid or a prompt to justify plots that involve killings or needless deaths.
This is precisely what I feared in the discussions generated by the school-shooting incidents: The introduction of guns, specifically how they got there, is not sufficiently examined. We talk about the political landscape—the feud between the political dynasties Duterte and Marcos, Rodrigo Duterte’s harmful and repeated threats of violence, his gun-toting when he was young, at the same time Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s ruthlessness and Marcos Jr.’s being a supposed wimp in comparison. Also about schools and bad teachers, the illusions created by the current neoliberal “outcomes-based” educational system, AI and the delusions it inflicts on learners. As well as video games, violence, desensitization, mental health, and underground crime networks; gun control laws and the do’s and don’ts of gun ownership; responsible parenting; and the unstoppable and irreparable moral decay of Filipino society… All while taking it as a given that the shooter kids got their guns from family members who are cops/security officers.
This is not saying that there are no other points to ponder when it comes to school shootings. But why are we missing the one that’s loud and clear, bright as day, right in front of us?
Like the way badly written stories consider Chekhov’s Gun as a prompt and not as a rule in storytelling, these auxiliary perspectives seem to excuse the presence of the gun. The question most people seem to ask is: How does society make sense of kids with guns? Yet in the case of the two school shootings, the simple fact is that there wouldn’t have been guns for the shooters to use if there were no irresponsible cops/security officers.
I find that in our imaginations of a Filipino society, so entrenched is the Philippine National Police that we find it difficult to criticize them, hold them liable, or to imagine a society without them. For many, it is much easier to imagine a country without video games, priests and churches, and bad parents, than a country without bad cops or cops per se. How hard must it be to understand that minus the bad cops, it’s minus the guns in schools, too?
Perhaps, this need to always have police officers around is rooted in our imaginings of a democracy. Maybe we have learned to accept the need to have cops—the good cops and the bad cops—because a democracy just won’t work without the guardrails and implementors who will punish those who commit crime. Almost immediately, when we think of upholding law and order in a democratic society, what follows is a clear straight line to justice: a courtroom, a prison cell, and an armed and capable police force able to arrest and detain criminals.
In this discussion, it is useful to remember that when the Americans handed us their Constitution to copy, we left two things out: first, the power of a jury to rule in court, and second, the right to bear arms. The right to bear arms, we left largely to the police and the military.
So deeply ingrained in our consciousness is the need for the presence of cops that we hardly question what they stand for, their history, or even the many times they themselves commit crimes and/or uncover that behind a crime is a cop and the cop assigned to solve it just doesn’t have the heart to shoot a fellow cop.
So, we become nauseated and uncomfortable when we seriously consider the idea of how these institutions, which should have a clear and uncompromising notion of what’s good and what’s bad, actually and quite often get it wrong.
The anthropologist and thinker David Graeber postulated in his essay “There Never Was a West” (published in 2007) how democracy—the way the “West” exported it to its colonies, at least—”relied on the coincidence of two factors: (1) a feeling that people should have equal say in making group decisions, and (2) a coercive apparatus capable of enforcing those decisions.” The police fall squarely in the second factor. Simply put, with the way we’ve been made to understand democracy, there can be no democracy without the police.
But in this (“Western”) democracy, Graeber looks at governments and their cops being valued simply for their power to coerce. As much as “to serve and protect” sounds good, these words are mere padding or marketing for an institution that seems largely concerned with coercion. At bottom, doing good or doing bad seems outside the concern of the police. (That’s the job of priests, pastors, and other religious leaders, maybe.) It looks like in things that require discerning whether an act is bad or good, one cannot trust cops to choose one or the other. Theirs is only the ability to coerce people to do things.
The lack of light on the contradictory nature of the police leads to syndication: While we are left with no choice but to trust them to do good or “to serve and protect,” we are also left with no choice but to take them as they are when they err. The so-called “misplaced” guns? The price we pay for this kind of democracy.
Unburdened with the weight of discerning right or wrong, cops take on jobs and hobbies which they are ultimately good at—coercion. They earn their job simply by carrying guns, or, more correct, by “gun-toting.”
So, coerce they will. Which is why I wonder, how come we dismiss such serious crimes to be mere “lapses” when they ultimately led to the shootings and the deaths of so many? Have we been coerced into thinking this is everyone else’s fault but theirs? CS
