Beyond alarm and scandal

They say that the people who want peace the most are soldiers.

I suppose that being in the emergency ward of government hospitals after the New Year fireworks go off is the equivalent of being in a war zone when the casualties pile up. Combine the constant explosions nearby with the screaming of ambulance sirens as they drive into the hospital ER, the screaming of children as they see their fingers, arms or limbs dangling on a piece of skin, all this plus the smell of gun powder in the air is just like war. Here the patients, whether actual combatants in the firework zone or innocent children and civilians are the “collateral damage” of this war.

But it is the doctors and nurses who are the “soldiers.” Their lives may not be at risk, their bodies may not be directly in harms way, but their senses, their minds, go through more combined trauma than each patient or each parent does. The doctors take it all in and just like many wars, the damage, loss and injury they witness in the ER during New Year’s Eve is utterly senseless and beyond comprehension.

It is a war we don’t need, people can’t afford, but one that we can put an end to.

This is the same war that DOH Secretary Janet Garin wants to win with the help of her former colleagues in the House of Representatives, all the medical prac- titioners in the Philippines, as well the public. It is not a war against firecrackers but a war on explosives passed on or sold as toys. It is a war against serious physical injury that has been accepted as part of the cost of revelry or outright stupidity. It is a war to save lives and young people’s productive future, not a war on merry-making.

The reality is that it would take decades for Filipinos to let go of their fiery and deadly tradition, but we must start somewhere. We can at least try to remove the deadly part of the tradition, the part where loud or poisonous explosives causes death or injury.

The fireworks industry has a whole year ahead to develop safe and non-lethal noise-makers based on our original “Kanyon” but utilizing modern technology, knowledge and materials. With all the intellect under the DOST, this should be a fun project that even the DepEd can promote as a competition. The bottom line is that the industry never had a need to develop safe products and no one or not enough people ever went to jail or paid serious fines.

Lets give incentives to whistle blowers and law enforcers who team up for the arrests of people and dealers that sell deadly firecrackers and let’s work for a tougher law and or fines for sale of piccolo, Goodbye Philippines etc. Let us redefine fireworks as lighting up the sky, not blowing people’s limbs and lives to Kingdom come.

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Like many Filipinos, I had mistakenly assumed that there was a specific or dedicated law that was against firing a gun in public or the unlawful discharge of a weapon. Many of us assumed that such a “crime” would be punishable with serious jail time almost equivalent to illegal possession of a deadly weapon equivalent to something like the 7-year term that a famous actor got sentenced with. I also assumed that the Department of Justice and their Judges as well as the PNP were in the habit of proposing judicial updates and recommendations to Congress in order to make our laws and justice system relevant. How wrong we were.

I got the shock of my life when an official of the PNP recently expressed the need to pass a law that would deal strictly and punitively with the illegal discharge of a deadly weapon because the only law that deals with the “crime” is the law on “Alarm and Scandal” that punishes you from any where of ONE day to THIRTY days in jail and a few hundred pesos fine!

What the hell is wrong with our lawmakers, law enforcers and the officials in the Department of Justice? Every year children get hit, if not indirectly shot by people guilty of illegally discharging a weapon. Last year, a young girl died in Caloocan and the case remains “unsolved,” this year, something like 36 per- sons were hit by stray bullets each of them ending up in the hospital, most of them poor or with very limited resources or funds to pay for something that was not their fault! How can something so deadly be mere “Alarm and Scandal”? Alarm and Scandal is your neighbor or the barangay officials singing out of tune using a Karaoke machine from midnight to noon! The law should provide a ten thousand fine for this sort of thing and immediate confiscation of the weapon: namely the Karaoke machine!

Alarm and Scandal is your lazy stupid neighbor who honks his horn at two in the morning because he is either too lazy to ring his doorbell or too stupid to have his own key so he can open the gate and not be an inconsiderate slob who wakes up his wife, the maids and the neighbors while waiting for someone to open the gate. If you’re security conscious use your cellphone not the car horn!

Alarm and Scandal is an elected or appointed or military government official who uses “wang-wangs” and back-up security vehicles.

There are more than enough Ex-PNP officials who are now in Congress that can push for tougher laws against the illegal discharge of a gun in public. If they want to; they can! That law should carry the same punishment that applies to frustrated murder, because the guilty party knew full well that it is against the law to fire a gun in public, and they know that firing a gun into the air can kill or hurt someone. By choosing to fire the gun at will makes it all intentional just like murder!

To encourage people to report, Congress should include a P1,000 fee on all guns sold, the money going to a trust fund that would provide a bounty or reward for people who report persons guilty of illegally discharging a weapon.

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