EDITORIAL - Firepower

A town mayor and three others, including a one-year-old boy, are shot dead right outside the NAIA Terminal 3. A prominent lawyer’s wife is shot and critically wounded outside her home in a gated village. People are wounded by bullets fired in celebration of an approaching new year.

This violence is possible because it is so easy for citizens and foreigners alike to obtain a gun in this country and even build up a personal arsenal. Consider the items police reported confiscating from Jerry Sy, a Chinese who claims to speak neither English nor Filipino. Last Thursday, Sy reportedly had an altercation with a casino agent at Resorts World Manila and fled to his car upon seeing responding policemen.

The car yielded five pistols, three silencers, three grenades, nearly 200 bullets, a stun gun, a hatchet and knives, a smoke grenade and metal spikes that can disable pursuing vehicles.

Whether Sy brought in the weapons or purchased them in the local black market, the firepower he managed to build up even with his lack of communication skills to get around in this country should ring alarm bells. Sy also presented identification cards and documents to cover his tracks. The persons responsible for these documents must be traced and thrown with Sy behind bars.

The country has some of the world’s toughest gun laws, but enforcement is laughable. The only ones that the government manages to regulate are legitimate gun owners who bother to go through the process of obtaining licenses and permits to carry their firearms outside their homes, paying the corresponding steep fees. Sy’s arrest was an offshoot of the commotion in a casino rather than sleuthing for loose firearms.

Only a fool will use a licensed weapon to commit a crime. Assassinations and drive-by shootings are almost always perpetrated using unlicensed guns that are impossible to trace. The use of a silencer adds another layer of difficulty in solving a gun attack. The government needs to step up its campaign against loose firearms, and not just during election season when there is a gun ban. This task goes to the core of keeping the public safe.