MANILA, Philippines--?He has a killer instinct.? That was how a police officer described Jason Ivler after their shootout with him. ?You could see it in the way his eyes blazed (nanlilisik). He was prepared to kill.?

A curious way to put it, the more normal one being, ?You knew he was determined not to be caught.? But you saw Ivler?s face as he lay on the floor with his hands twisted behind his back, you knew the police officer described it perfectly. It wasn?t the tattoos he wore that gave him a chilling air, it was his eyes. Those were not wild, bloodshot, eyes crazed by drugs. Those were cold, defiant eyes, ready to remove anything in his path.

Is he just like that? Did he grow up badly? Is there a loose screw in his head? Or are his homicidal tendencies the product of joining the US Special Forces and being sent to Iraq, a thing guaranteed to make the sanest youth paranoid and contemptuous of human life, humanity divisible only into friend and foe? Post-traumatic stress disorder is a frightening thing, and we have to wonder if we do not have other ticking time bombs in the heart of the city in the form of people who have seen combat duty in Mindanao and elsewhere roaming about.

Whatever the case, Ivler was an accident waiting to happen. That became the accident that was the road mishap that took the life of the driver of the other car and injured his wife. That became the accident that was the altercation between him and Renato Ebarle Jr., where he got out of his car and coolly shot Ebarle to death. That became the accident that was his trading shots with the cops that came for him, armed with a ?baby Armalite,? determined not to be caught, or, as the police later put it, determined to kill.

Question is: What the hell was he doing with all those guns?

That is not a non-sequitur as it seems. Truly, you get used to seeing something, you don?t notice it anymore. It doesn?t strike you as odd, bizarre, or a thing that leaps out of the commonplace anymore. It becomes like the smog that envelops Metro Manila, something you see only when you are in Antipolo at dusk or on a plane at sunrise. The one thing in fact that?s there that we cannot see, the one thing we?re constantly assailed with but cannot feel, is guns, guns, guns.

That was the spectacle we were treated to in ABS-CBN?s exclusive clip on the arrest of Ivler. The sight of guns, the sound of guns, the smell, taste and feel of guns. Except that we did not recoil from the sensation of them because we did not sense them. We saw only an action movie starring the cops vs. Ivler.

No one I spoke to afterward wondered how in God?s name Ivler came to possess an assault rifle, among many other arms. He was not a cop, he was not a soldier, he was not a security guard. Hell, he wasn?t even a Filipino citizen, as Rodolfo Biazon pointed out. But he had guns aplenty, one of which he lugged in his car and took out to take out another human being for no other reason than that he was pissed off by his driving.

Only a month ago, we were treated to the same spectacle, or more, but we did not see it either. That was the cache of arms being dug out of the Ampatuans? backyard in Maguindanao. What we saw was not the guns themselves but their source, which was the AFP, and so we asked only what the military issues were doing in the hands of the Ampatuans. We did not ask what the Ampatuans, notwithstanding that they were local officials, were doing keeping an entire arsenal of arms.

The weapons in and of themselves were eye-popping: machine guns, mortars, and rounds and rounds of ammunition, things you saw only in Iraq and other war-torn countries. Later a call would issue from the bowels of this earth for private armies to be scuttled. No similar call would issue from the pit of this land for all the arms from Aparri to Jolo, from small to large, from puny to lethal, from being useful for murder to being perfect for massacre, to be carted off and dropped into the mouth of Mayon Volcano.

The same thing is bound to happen in the case of Ivler. The public is bound to demand that more care is exercised in giving people licenses to carry guns, lest they fall into the hands of crazies like him. Or probably even less: The public might not even demand that at all; it might simply demand that people like him?and the Ampatuans, who not quite incidentally also put up a fight, or threatened to, without suffering the same fate as Ivler?be locked up and the key dropped into the Pacific Ocean.

Nandy Pacheco was the first to have the eyes to see the one thing that is there but should not be there. At least he was the first to try to do something about it with his dream of a Gunless Society. I don?t know if that dream is entirely realizable, but I know that we can, and should, stop the sheer flood of arms tumbling like ?Ondoy? into these shores. The only thing worse than a country not being able to feed its population is a country not being able to feed its population while being able to arm it.

The notion that guns do not kill, people do, is idiotic. If Ivler had only his fists with him when he met Ebarle, Ebarle would still be alive. The most sober citizen is prone to road rage, among many other rages he is prone to in this country, and far better that he unburdens himself with curses than with bullets. Guns addle the brain worse than drugs. With drugs you can only harm yourself, not others. Might as well say shabu doesn?t kill, people do. Power does corrupt and absolute power absolutely, and nowhere does power reside more absolutely than in the hand with the gun. A proliferation of guns, with its attendant culture, swagger and fetish, warps a society as surely as the proliferation of cancer cells does a body. We need books, not guns.

Buy the book, ban the gun.