The Warning Before the Trigger

Richard Jonathan O. Taduran, Ph.D.  |  25 June 2026

On the morning of June 22, students at San Jose National High School in Tacloban City gathered for what should have been another ordinary day of classes. Two Grade 9 students were already on campus. One had attended the flag ceremony before meeting the other inside a comfort room. For more than an hour, they reportedly waited, carrying a 9 mm pistol and a .38-caliber revolver.

At around nine o’clock, they emerged and began looking for someone. They failed to find their intended target, yet the gunfire began.

They moved toward occupied classrooms as students and teachers tried to flee, hide, or hold doors shut. By the time the shooting ended, three students were dead and 20 others had been injured—at least 15 by bullets and several more in the desperate rush to escape.

The Philippines has witnessed many forms of violence, but school shootings remain extraordinarily rare here and uncommon across much of Southeast Asia. That morning in Tacloban, a crime many Filipinos associated with distant countries suddenly entered a Philippine classroom.

The Anatomy of Grievance

Mass violence rarely appears without a history inside the offender’s mind. Across many documented cases, perpetrators have carried a grievance—a deeply felt belief that they have been wronged through rejection, humiliation, exclusion, injustice, or loss of status. The perceived injury may arise from bullying, interpersonal rejection, conflict with authority, failure to receive recognition, or a persistent conviction that others have deliberately mistreated them.

The grievance itself does not explain the violence. Many people endure humiliation and disappointment without harming anyone. The danger develops when the perceived wrong is repeatedly revisited until it becomes central to the person’s identity. “I was rejected” becomes “They destroyed me.” “No one listened” becomes “I will force them to pay attention.” Personal suffering is gradually transformed into a justification for retaliation.

Violence may then be imagined as a way to reverse the balance of power. It allows the offender to punish those held responsible, strike back at an institution, turn private humiliation into public dominance, and regain a temporary sense of control. Someone who felt ignored or powerless may fantasize about becoming feared, recognized, and impossible to overlook.

The intended target may initially be specific: a bully, teacher, administrator, coworker, former partner, or anyone associated with the perceived injury. Yet mass violence rarely remains confined to that person. Criminologist Eric Hickey uses the term “collateral prey” for victims who are attacked not because they caused the grievance, but simply because they are present when the offender acts.

This is especially significant in school shootings. A student may enter the campus looking for one person, but the school itself can come to represent rejection, authority, failure, or an entire social world believed to be hostile. Once the attack moves from an intended target to occupied classrooms, innocent students are forced to bear the consequences of a grievance they did not create. What begins as personal revenge becomes indiscriminate punishment.

The Mechanics of Leakage

The Tacloban shooting may have lasted only minutes, but the emerging evidence suggests that it did not begin that morning.

Police say the two students may have discussed the attack weeks in advance, while investigators reportedly found messages referring to a “mission.” Those exchanges may indicate that the shooting was planned, although investigators are still establishing their meaning and context. One suspect had reportedly been taught to shoot by a police relative whose pistol he later used in the attack, turning prior training and access into lethal capability.

They also raise a difficult question: did anyone encounter fragments of that plan before the shooting?

Threat-assessment specialists call this leakage—the communication of an intention to commit violence before it is carried out. It may be an explicit threat, but it can also appear as a joke, boast, coded message, violent post, disturbing video, farewell statement, or unusual fascination with previous attackers. Individually, these behaviours may appear vague or harmless. Their significance often becomes visible only when someone connects them.

Authorities are now examining the suspects’ interest in foreign school shootings, violent online spaces, and material that may have influenced how they imagined the attack. A violent game, disturbing video, or particular shirt does not turn a child into a killer. But such details matter when they appear alongside resentment, firearm access, target selection, and communication between prospective attackers.

That is why prevention cannot depend on guards and bag inspections alone. Schools and communities need trusted reporting channels and coordinated threat assessment involving educators, mental health professionals, and law enforcement. The task is not to identify children who resemble a stereotypical school shooter. It is to notice when anger is becoming fixation, when fantasy is becoming preparation, and when a threat is beginning to acquire a weapon, a target, and a date.

The Calculus of Liability

Many school shootings are planned as final acts, with attackers entering the scene prepared to die. Tacloban may be different. The suspects survived, and investigators reportedly found messages suggesting that they had discussed whether their ages would shield them from criminal liability. If authenticated, those exchanges raise the disturbing possibility that they expected to survive with limited legal consequences.

They could have been calculating their exemption from criminal liability based on a stark legal reality. Under Philippine law, children aged 15 or younger are exempt from criminal liability and instead undergo intervention. The suspects have inadvertently revived a fierce national debate over juvenile criminal responsibility, and calls to lower the minimum age have intensified.

There will be pressure to name one culprit: bullying, violent games, mental illness, negligent parents, weak school security, negligent firearm storage, or a juvenile justice law that many already consider too lenient. But school shootings rarely emerge from one cause alone. The real lesson of Tacloban is that grievance can harden into revenge, violent fantasy can find a model, and missed warning signs can cost lives—until we learn to see them in time.