The wrong fix

Following the fatal school shooting at Ateneo de Zamboanga University last Tuesday, which left two students dead and nine others injured, news reports say that the Philippine National Police is considering imposing additional, stricter requirements for the issuance of firearm permits.

PNP chief General Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr. said applicants and gun owners renewing their permits may soon be required to attend a gun safety seminar that is focused on the proper storage and safekeeping of firearms. He has also ordered the Civil Security Group to prepare updated guidelines for regular gun safety seminars for registered firearm owners nationwide.

I’m not sure how this adds another layer of safety to our already-strict gun ownership and permit-to-carry laws. But it certainly sounds like something is being done about guns ending up in the hands of minors.

Meanwhile, Department of the Interior and Local Government Secretary Jonvic Remulla called on lawmakers on Wednesday to amend current laws on firearm possession. Remulla said the “Robin Padilla Law”, which lowered the penalties and made many illegal-possession cases bailable, has led to a surge in crimes “precisely because loose firearms is a bailable offense.”

He was apparently referring to the 1997 law that acquired its informal name from actor-turned-senator Robinhood Padilla, who had been imprisoned for illegal possession of firearms and was among those who benefited from the reduced penalties under the law.

To be frank, I am quite wary of what our government officials say whenever a tragedy makes the news. Too often, the solution they propose does not really address the problem that caused it. It’s usually the classic “let’s make everything stricter” approach.

RA 10591, the current comprehensive firearms law, already requires an LTOPF applicant to pass a gun-safety seminar. LTOPF stands for License to Own and Possess Firearms. It also already requires licensed private owners to keep firearms in a vault or container secured by lock and key or other security measures.

In other words, the school shooting tragedies were not for lack of rules. Each incident was more a failure of enforcement. And we keep responding to failures of enforcement by creating more rules for the majority of law-abiding citizens who, as the name suggests, already follow the rules.

Every time something terrible happens, we are usually quick to ask, “What additional requirement can we impose? How can we make this stricter?”

A 2016 study published in The Lancet examined 25 firearm laws in the United States. Only nine were associated with lower firearm deaths. Nine were associated with higher deaths, while seven showed no clear effect. Its conclusion suggests that what matters is not more or stricter firearm laws, but relevant and effective ones.

In the recent school shooting incidents in Tacloban and Zamboanga, what really went wrong?

In the Tacloban case, the police officer whose Glock was allegedly taken by her 14-year-old nephew admitted that she had kept the gun in a locked plastic locker rather than in a vault. In the Zamboanga case, the firearms involved were issued by the Bureau of Customs to the alleged shooter’s father, who reportedly claimed that he had accidentally left his firearms inside his car with his driver.

So the more relevant and effective response would be to require agencies that issue service firearms to their personnel to periodically account for how those firearms are actually kept, conduct meaningful compliance checks, and seriously enforce existing disciplinary and criminal penalties for negligent custody.

That is much closer to the actual problem. Not the proposal to require applicants and those renewing their licenses to attend a “comprehensive gun safety seminar,” which merely adds another layer, or repeats something the law already requires.

The school shootings involving minors were not about who should be allowed to possess a firearm. They were about the safekeeping of firearms by people whom the law had already allowed to possess them. Adding more layers to the rulebook only burdens those already inclined to comply, while leaving the behavior that caused the problem unaddressed.

More generally, we should avoid making ordinary law-abiding citizens go through an already-lengthy bureaucratic process only to face still more requirements, especially when the most obvious failures in these school shootings involved government-issued weapons already entrusted to government personnel.