School shootings have long been associated more strongly with countries such as the United States than with the Philippines. Yet whenever a shooting involving students, teachers, or school personnel occurs, one uncomfortable question inevitably follows: Why does a young person reach a point where killing another person becomes an acceptable response to anger, humiliation, or grievance?
It is tempting to reduce the issue to gun ownership. But that explanation is incomplete. There have always been Filipino families who owned firearms, and most children who grew up around guns never used them to threaten, hurt, or kill anyone. The presence of a weapon matters because it can make violence more lethal, but the weapon alone does not explain why someone decides to use it.
One factor worth examining is the possibility that the psychological barrier to violence is becoming lower for some young people. This does not mean that an entire generation is becoming violent or morally worse. Most young people exposed to bullying, rejection, anger, or violent media will never become violent themselves. However, the environment in which today’s teenagers develop is fundamentally different from that of previous generations.
Young people are now exposed to graphic violence, humiliation, threats, revenge narratives, and online communities on an unprecedented scale. Violence is no longer something they encounter only in movies or television. It can appear repeatedly in social media feeds, videos, online discussions, games, and communities where extreme ideas can be reinforced. Repeated exposure does not automatically create violent behavior, but it can potentially make violence feel less psychologically distant. When violence is repeatedly portrayed as a means of gaining power, settling scores, or getting revenge, the idea of using violence may gradually become less unthinkable to someone who is already psychologically vulnerable.
Another major difference is the nature of bullying and humiliation.
Bullying has always existed. A student could be mocked in the classroom, excluded by classmates, or humiliated in front of friends. But traditionally, there was at least a physical boundary to the experience. A child could leave school, go home, and have some distance from the people who had embarrassed him.
That boundary has largely disappeared.
Today, humiliation can continue through Messenger, Facebook, TikTok, group chats, comments, and private messages. An embarrassing incident can be recorded, shared, screenshotted, and replayed. A student who was humiliated at school may continue experiencing that humiliation long after leaving the campus. What used to be an isolated incident can become a 24-hour social experience.
For an emotionally immature teenager, this can be devastating. Adolescents can experience social rejection and humiliation with extraordinary intensity. What an adult might perceive as an unpleasant but temporary event may feel, to a teenager, like a catastrophic loss of status, dignity, or belonging.
But humiliation alone does not explain extreme violence. The more important question is what happens after the humiliation.
Some young people process pain by seeking support, talking to someone, withdrawing temporarily, or eventually moving on. Others may begin constructing a narrative around their suffering: Everyone is against me. Nobody understands me. They deserve what is coming to them. They will pay for what they did.
This is where grievance and revenge become particularly important.
There is a psychological difference between saying, “I was hurt,” and believing, “They must suffer because they hurt me.” The first is an expression of pain. The second transforms pain into justification.
When a young person begins to define himself primarily through grievance—through the belief that he is constantly victimized, rejected, humiliated, or persecuted—anger can become part of his identity. Revenge may then begin to feel less like an impulsive act and more like a form of justice.
The internet can make this process more complicated.
In the past, a teenager with an extreme or violent thought might have had very few people with whom to discuss it. He might have been forced to confront the thought alone and recognize that it was disturbing or unacceptable.
Today, he can potentially find people online who will validate his anger.
This does not mean that online communities cause school shootings. They do not. But they can sometimes provide reinforcement for distorted thinking. A person who already believes that the world is against him may find others who tell him that his anger is justified. A thought such as “I hate them” can gradually become “They are all evil.” And “I want them to suffer” can become “They deserve whatever happens to them.”
That shift is important because violence often requires more than anger. It requires some degree of moral disengagement—a process through which another person stops being seen as someone whose life has value and instead becomes an enemy who supposedly deserves punishment.
Adolescence itself also matters.
Teenagers are capable of sophisticated reasoning. They can understand complicated social issues, debate morality, and make surprisingly mature decisions. But the adolescent brain is still developing, particularly in areas related to impulse control, emotional regulation, and the evaluation of long-term consequences.
This does not mean teenagers are incapable of knowing right from wrong. They absolutely can.
It means that intense emotions can sometimes overwhelm judgment in ways that are less likely in a psychologically mature adult.
There is an enormous difference between “I hate my teacher” and “I am going to school tomorrow to kill my teacher.” A normal moment of anger does not automatically evolve into homicidal intent. There are multiple psychological steps between the two.
That is precisely why prevention cannot begin only when someone is already holding a weapon.
We need to pay attention to the escalation that can occur beforehand: persistent humiliation, social isolation, obsessive grievance, revenge fantasies, fascination with previous attacks, threats, violent ideation, and the increasing belief that violence is justified. None of these signs, by themselves, mean that a teenager will become a school shooter. Most troubled young people will never commit violence.
But when several of these factors converge—particularly when combined with access to a lethal weapon—the risk becomes much more serious.
This is also why the conversation about school shootings should not become a simplistic argument about whether guns are the cause.
A firearm can dramatically increase the consequences of a violent decision. Restricting access, securing firearms properly, and preventing children from obtaining them are therefore extremely important. But removing the weapon does not necessarily remove the grievance, the hatred, the desire for revenge, or the psychological process that produced the violent intention in the first place.
Likewise, focusing exclusively on bullying misses part of the problem. Bullying has existed for generations. What has changed is the environment surrounding it: social media, constant connectivity, permanent digital humiliation, online reinforcement, and unprecedented access to violent content and communities.
The Philippines should therefore be careful not to dismiss school shootings as something that could “never happen here.” The cultural context is different, and the frequency of such incidents may be far lower than in countries where school shootings have become a recurring phenomenon. But rarity does not mean impossibility.
The goal should not be to label today’s teenagers as a violent generation. That would be both unfair and inaccurate.
Instead, we should ask a more difficult question: What happens when an emotionally vulnerable young person experiences humiliation, develops a grievance, finds an online environment that reinforces his anger, begins to see revenge as justice, and eventually gains access to a lethal weapon?
That combination is far more important than any single factor.
Preventing school violence therefore requires more than simply telling children to be good. It requires schools that take bullying and threats seriously, parents who pay attention to dramatic changes in behavior, adults who are willing to intervene when a young person becomes consumed by revenge, responsible control and storage of firearms, and communities that do not normalize violent fantasies as merely teenage drama.
Most angry teenagers will grow up, move on, and forget the people who once embarrassed them.
The danger lies in the minority who do not move on—those who turn humiliation into grievance, grievance into hatred, hatred into revenge, and revenge into a justification for violence.
And perhaps that is where the conversation about school shootings should begin.
Not with the question, “Why did he have a gun?” but with the much harder question: “What happened inside this young person that made killing seem like an acceptable answer?”
