DILG wants gun owners punished for unsecured firearms

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

MANILA — Interior Secretary Juanito Victor “Jonvic” Remulla has asked Congress to criminalize the careless storage of firearms and to strip loose-firearm offenses of bail, an accountability push that moves the legal burden from the children who pull the trigger to the adults who own the weapons.

The call came at a Department of the Interior and Local Government press briefing on Aug. 19, roughly 26 hours after an Aug. 18 attack in which a Grade 9 student walked into the Ateneo de Zamboanga University junior high school building in Barangay Tumaga with two pistols, killed a Grade 10 schoolmate on the fourth floor, and shot himself on the fifth.

It was the second fatal school shooting in the Philippines in eight weeks. In both cases, the weapons were issued or licensed to a relative in government service.

“The young shooter is treated as a juvenile,” Remulla said. “Isn’t the owner of the gun equally responsible?”

Under current law, a gun owner whose weapon is taken by a child and used to kill faces prosecution only for reckless imprudence. Remulla likened the exposure to that of a person who lends a car to a driver who then runs someone over.

“I call upon Congress to enact laws that will penalize gun owners for the non-safekeeping of their weapons,” he said, seated beside Philippine National Police chief Gen. Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr.

By Aug. 20, the PNP had moved on its own authority. Nartatez said the force is studying additional requirements for the issuance and renewal of firearms licenses, including mandatory comprehensive gun safety seminars and stricter safekeeping standards.

He directed the PNP Civil Security Group and the Firearms and Explosives Office to update the guidelines.

“The gun-related incidents in schools and communities, particularly involving minors, all boil down to the issue of accessibility to firearms,” Nartatez said. “This is where the intervention should also focus on, and this is what we in the PNP will address.”

How two pistols reached the fourth floor

Both firearms belonged to Lt. Elias Jalani II, head of the Bureau of Customs Enforcement and Security Service at the Port of Zamboanga.

One is a .40-caliber Glock 22, issued to him by the bureau. The other is a 9mm Glock fitted with a RONI conversion kit, a chassis that makes a pistol resemble a carbine.

The chassis accounts for the first-day reports of a rifle on campus.

Jalani told investigators that he had left the gun bag in his vehicle, and that a driver, not he, brought his son to school that morning.

Remulla did not accept the account. “We find it highly improbable,” he said, noting that uniformed personnel are trained in safekeeping and that officers do not part with their service weapons.

The breach turned on a distinction common to Philippine campuses: pedestrians entering the gate had their bags inspected; vehicles did not.

The student rode in, alighted at the basement, and walked up.

Ateneo de Zamboanga employed 25 security guards, 15 of them on duty that morning. Two police vehicles were parked outside.

Seven fired cartridges were recovered, four from the 9mm and three from the .40-caliber.

Remulla said the entire episode lasted two to three minutes, less time than responders needed to reach the fourth floor.

Customs Commissioner Ariel Nepomuceno relieved Jalani of his post, placed him under preventive suspension, and ordered a bureau-wide inventory of issued firearms with compliance reports due within 24 hours.

“Administrative liability, definitely, there is negligence there,” Nepomuceno said.

He also described Jalani as a good officer who had nothing to do with his son’s actions. No criminal charge had been filed against him as of Aug. 20.

There is precedent for pursuing the adult. After the June 22 shooting at San Jose National High School in Tacloban City, where two students aged 14 and 15 killed three classmates and wounded about 20 others, the PNP filed a malversation case against the police officer from whom one of the boys had taken a Glock.

She was also fined PHP 10,000 for failing to report the loss, had her license revoked, and faced a grave misconduct case. A security agency lost its license over the second weapon, a .38-caliber revolver.

The 98% question

The load-bearing number in the DILG argument is a single statistic: 98% of gun crimes in the country are committed with loose firearms.

Remulla cited it repeatedly, alongside an estimate of 2.78 million firearms nationwide, more than 2 million of them in private hands and about 780,000 held by the military, police, and other uniformed agencies.

Under Republic Act No. 10591, the Comprehensive Firearms and Ammunition Regulation Act of 2013, a loose firearm is one that is unregistered, obliterated, stolen, illegally manufactured, or held on an expired license.

No PNP dataset, study, or agency release has been published to support the 98% figure. It exists in the public record as the secretary’s assertion.

A similar claim, that 99.95% of gun-related crimes involved loose firearms, was made by then-Sen. Gregorio Honasan at a 2018 Senate hearing, likewise without published methodology.

The statute Remulla wants undone is Republic Act No. 8294, enacted in 1997, which amended Presidential Decree No. 1866 and made possession of loose firearms a bailable offense.

It is popularly called the Robin Padilla law, although Padilla did not write it. The measure was authored by then-Sens. Franklin Drilon, Miriam Defensor Santiago, and Ramon Revilla Sr., and signed by President Fidel V. Ramos.

Padilla was elected to the Senate only in 2022; the nickname derives from his own illegal firearms case.

Padilla did not defend the law. On Aug. 19 he backed the repeal and pointed to his Senate Bill No. 2412 amending the firearms act.

He then offered a proposal of his own.

“Mas mabuting balita ang Martial Law kaysa sa walang batas o pambabaluktot ng batas! Declare it and I support!” he said. Martial law, he argued, is better news than no law at all or the bending of it.

What Congress has filed

Sen. Risa Hontiveros filed Senate Resolution No. 610 on Aug. 19, seeking an inquiry into what she called a pattern of serious violent activity by children.

“Schools must be zones of peace and learning with no place for violence or killing,” she said. A Senate hearing on school violence was set for Aug. 20.

In the House, Rep. Robert Nazal filed House Resolution No. 1381 seeking an investigation.

Assistant Majority Leader Javier Miguel Benitez of Negros Occidental filed a separate bill that would make loose-firearm offenses non-bailable, impose criminal liability for negligent storage, establish a 50-meter gun-free zone around schools, and require serialization of 3D-printed firearms.

The gaming theory, and the pushback

Remulla also attributed the attack in part to online radicalization, saying the shooter wore a body camera and streamed the assault to a shock website, and that the method resembled a first-person shooter game. He named Roblox.

He hedged in the same breath. “Roblox in itself is not a dangerous game. It is the chat group that is inside it,” he said, adding that forensic examination of the shooter’s devices was incomplete.

Education Secretary Sonny Angara, who flew to Zamboanga City on Aug. 19, said reports that the boy was a heavy gamer remain unconfirmed, and that it is not true he was bullied or depressed.

Clinicians have contested the gaming theory before. After Tacloban, Dr. Rafael Henry Legaspi of the University of the Philippines-Philippine General Hospital Division of Addiction and Recovery Medicine said there is no conclusive evidence of a direct link, noting that Japan and South Korea sustain two of the world’s strongest gaming cultures alongside two of its lowest gun homicide rates.

Nartatez directed the PNP Anti-Cybercrime Group to intensify monitoring and coordinate with platforms on takedowns. “We appeal to everyone to refrain from sharing or reposting the videos and photos of the incident,” he said.

In Western Visayas, the gap is a staffing problem

The vulnerability Remulla described at the national level shows up in Region 6 as vacant positions.

Of 350 plantilla items for secondary school guidance counselors in the Department of Education Region 6, 306 are vacant. Forty-four are filled.

The region has no plantilla counselor position at all in elementary schools. Iloilo City has four secondary school counselors and none in elementary.

Physical security is thinner. Western Visayas has roughly 2,841 public schools, and about three-fourths have no plantilla security guard position.

Nationally, 2,494 such positions serve some 48,000 public schools, a ratio of about one permanent guard for every 20 schools.

Schools close the gap by hiring watchmen out of maintenance and other operating expenses, and by buying metal detectors under the PHP 50,000 threshold from the same fund.

Angara said the department intends to hire 48,000 school counselor associates, of which only 10,000 are funded this year.

The region has had its own warning. On June 30, a loaded .38-caliber revolver was recovered from a 15-year-old learner’s backpack at Barotac Nuevo National Comprehensive High School in Iloilo.

On Aug. 3, DepEd-6 conducted an active shooter simulation in Iloilo City.

Remulla, for his part, cast the response as collective, and exempted no one in the room from it.

“Sama-sama tayo,” he said. “Everyone has to learn from this experience.”