A 17-year-old boy walks into a school in the Philippines, pulls a handgun, and kills three people. The trigger? A grudge over bullying. The Guardian reports that UK security services are now conducting a review of safeguarding measures. As if a clipboard and a risk assessment can prevent what is essentially a moral and cultural collapse.
Let us be clear: this is not a gun control issue. The Philippines has some of the strictest firearms laws in Asia. This is not a mental health issue, though that will be the fashionable scapegoat. This is the fruit of a society that has forgotten how to raise men. We have traded stoicism for therapy, resilience for trigger warnings, and honour for victimhood. The result is a generation of boys who, when humiliated, reach for a weapon instead of a pair of fists or, God forbid, a stiff upper lip.
The school in question had anti-bullying policies. They had counsellors. They had everything the modern safeguarding industry demands. And yet a boy still decided that murder was a reasonable response to being teased. Why? Because we have stripped away the old mechanisms of social pressure. Shame, once a powerful deterrent, is now a pathology. Discipline is abuse. Authority is oppression. We have created a vacuum, and violence rushes in to fill it.
The UK’s review will likely produce more box-ticking, more training modules, more phone apps for reporting concerns. It will not produce what is actually needed: a cultural revolution that reasserts the values of restraint, accountability, and moral courage. Until we are willing to say that some behaviour is simply evil, and that the proper response to bullying is not a massacre but character, we will keep having this conversation over the bodies of children.
The Romans had a term for this: 'decadence'. A society that has grown too soft to enforce its own norms. The Philippines is a warning. The West is not listening.
