Three students are dead, including a 16-year-old gunman who took his own life, after a shooting at a school in Banga, South Cotabato, in the southern Philippines on Friday.
Eight other students were wounded, four of them critically. Provincial officials say every victim, including the shooter, was between 14 and 17 years old.
Banga mayor Albert Palencia told Reuters the teenager gave his classmates advance warning that went unheeded because he had a reputation as a joker.
“The suspect supposedly sat beside his friends and told them to go home ‘because after lunch, I will be executing my plan.’ His friends laughed because the shooter was a known joker,” Palencia said.
The warning was not a bluff. “After lunch, he started shooting students. He hit 10 students before killing himself,” Palencia said.
Third Incident Since June
Friday’s attack is the third deadly school shooting in the Philippines in under four months, a country where such violence was once almost unheard of.
In June, two classmates opened fire at a public high school in Tacloban, killing at least three students and wounding roughly 20 others. Last month in Zamboanga, a student live-streamed himself shooting and killing a classmate in a classroom before killing himself.
The Philippines maintains comparatively strict gun laws, requiring background checks and psychological evaluations for legal ownership. Illegal firearms nonetheless continue to circulate.
Officials Call for Responsibility at Home
South Cotabato Governor Reynaldo Tamayo placed responsibility squarely on gun owners and parents, arguing that schools cannot be expected to police every student.
“We need to be responsible in storing firearms. Gun owners, in particular, must make sure that minors do not have access to them,” Tamayo told Reuters. “We cannot expect a handful of security personnel to monitor thousands of students. We need to work together because otherwise this will be very difficult for us to address.”
The Banga shooting also follows a school shooting rampage in Thailand near Bangkok in August, adding to a run of youth gun violence across the region this year.
