Our need for culprits

Barely a week has passed since the shooting at the Ateneo de Zamboanga University (AdZU) junior high school. Yet one can hardly keep up with the flurry of blame-casting and mandatory preventive measures that has followed. A straight line has been drawn from Ateneo to the Tacloban school shooting two months ago and, by extension, to what is perceived as an American phenomenon that has crossed national and cultural boundaries.

The public alarm is palpable, and not unreasonable. What is harder is telling apart the responses that are merely reflexive from those that, while not yet carefully documented, appear sensible. There is room here, I believe, for a perspective that acknowledges the complexity of such situations.

I was on the road last Tuesday, Aug. 18, when the first reports came in. My car radio was tuned to the AM stations known for breaking news; their programming that day had been dominated by communities still flooded by the monsoon rains. Then Zamboanga broke in. The key resource person was no less than the city mayor, hurrying through questions from the hosts while politely pleading for patience, since the facts in his hands were incomplete. He could confirm that the place was indeed the AdZU’s high school, that two students lay dead, and that firearms had been brought onto the campus. The rest went unanswered. Was the shooter a student? What weapons exactly? How did he get them past the gate?

Within the hour, the reports began referring to video footage circulating online. The entire event had apparently been live streamed from a body camera worn by the student shooter himself. Authorities cast doubt on its authenticity while admonishing the public not to share it. This only fueled more speculation and on-the-spot analysis.

Reaching home, I turned to YouTube to see whether the footage existed. It did, and it was spreading across platforms, drawing a cascade of commentary. The most visible comments came from two sides of the political fence: critics of the Duterte regime blaming the former president’s drug war for the culture of violence, and Duterte supporters blaming the “pinklawan” for the proliferation of guns. It was a caricature of what was about to unfold on a larger scale—the politicization and moralization of everything that threatens public safety, much of it invoking what purports to be the evidence from science.

What this form of response does is convert a “danger,” which is attributable to the environment, into a “risk,” which is attributable to a decision someone made or failed to make. And science is expected to complete the operation: to test, to verify, and to pinpoint the culprit with forensic precision.

That was the promise I went looking for when I turned to the scientific literature. Three references came up: the Secret Service’s Safe School Initiative (2002), Protecting America’s Schools (2019), and Averting Targeted School Violence (2021). To my amazement, much of what I found ran against the grain of the public conversation we were hearing this past week.

The evidence does not support the claim that heavy exposure to violent video games predisposes school shooters to enact what they have seen. Roblox, the online platform repeatedly named in these discussions, is not even a violent game.

The most consistent conclusion is that there is no profile of the typical school shooter. Attackers vary in age, race, grade, academic standing, and social position; there are popular students among them as well as isolates. Millions of young people pass through bullying, depression, and broken homes without becoming murderous shooters. Nor is the deed wrapped in secrecy: in plots that were averted, 94 percent of the plotters had communicated their intentions to someone beforehand.

The two firmest correlates are access to firearms, usually taken from home, and a strong suicidal tendency. There is moderate support as well for contagion and imitation; and grievance against a teacher or a classmate is common. These immediately caught my attention because they seem to fit Zamboanga almost exactly. But we should be wary of generalizing, since the overwhelming majority of students carrying the same resentments never resort to violence. What the studies show is that such factors may be necessary; none of them is sufficient.

Which returns me to what continues to intrigue me. The science avoids naming a specific culprit. Yet, the allocation of blame proceeds anyway—usually ahead of the evidence, and sometimes in spite of it. Nothing seems to appease our urgent need for action quite like making some people pay, and requiring institutions to comply with mandates that signal they are manning their gates.

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