Two shootings, oceans apart, tell a single story. One unfolded on Australia’s Bondi Beach, where a Jewish festival was turned into a killing field. The other struck an Ivy League school in the United States, where exams were underway and students were shot in a classroom.
The details differ, but the lesson does not: Violence is not new, and what distinguishes societies in many instances is how much damage violence is allowed to do.
Australia’s horror shocks precisely because mass shootings there are rare. They have been rare for decades, not because Australians are gentler than other people, but because the state made a choice after Port Arthur in 1996.
Nearly three decades ago, Australians decided guns would no longer be easily available, and grievance would no longer be armed by default. Sure, that did not eliminate hatred, extremism, or madness. Still, it did something more modest and more important — it limited the scale of carnage.
The United States, by contrast, has chosen a different path. The Brown University shooting barely registers as a national rupture because it fits a pattern that has become routine. Students dead, and a manhunt, knee-jerk at that, is launched.
In America, the cycle repeats because the conditions that make it possible are permanent. In America, access to firearms is treated as an entitlement. Everything else — classrooms, churches, concerts — adjusts around that premise.
The Philippines sits somewhere between these two worlds. We do not have America’s gun culture, but neither are we immune to violence. What we do have are layers of friction: licensing requirements, election gun bans, checkpoints and periodic crackdowns.
These are often dismissed as inconveniences. They are the reason shootings here usually kill one or two people, not dozens.
Filipinos like to say, “it will not happen here.” That is false comfort. Violence is already happening here, mostly during elections, in workplaces and within families.
What has so far spared us from mass casualty events is not virtue, but difficulty. Guns are harder to acquire, harder to carry, harder to use without consequence. Remove those factors and the numbers change.
Bondi also reminds us that ideology travels faster than weapons. Antisemitism, religious extremism, conspiracy thinking are not foreign imports anymore. They circulate freely online, amplified by algorithms that reward outrage and certainty.
The Philippines is not insulated from this. Our own digital spaces are already saturated with grievance, suspicion and dehumanization. Add easier access to firearms and the danger multiplies.
In both Australia and the United States, misinformation followed the gunfire almost immediately. In Sydney, lies targeting immigrants and Muslims spread before facts were established. In Rhode Island, speculation filled the vacuum left by official uncertainty.
We, Filipinos, know this pattern well. We have seen how false narratives turn crises into chaos. In a society where trust in institutions is already thin, disinformation can be as destabilizing as the violence itself.
There is also a political lesson here. Australia’s prime minister openly acknowledged that gun laws may need tightening again. That is what leadership looks like: not reverence for past reforms, but willingness to revisit them when reality changes.
Meanwhile, the United States, trapped by absolutist readings of freedom, cannot do the same. The result is paralysis punctuated by mourning.
The Philippines? The choice before us is not abstract. It is practical. Do we maintain the barriers that keep violence from scaling up, or do we erode them in the name of convenience, bravado, or imported notions of freedom?
Do we treat gun control as a necessary restraint, or as a negotiable nuisance?
Australia shows what follows when the state chooses restraint. America shows the cost of treating restraint as weakness. The Philippines still stands at the crossroads, with time to choose — if it does not mistake delay for wisdom.