Save children

Reports say the 20-year-old gunman Adam Lanza had Asperger’s syndrome and was home-schooled by his mother because he had problems adjusting to regular school. He is reported to have spent much time playing violent video games. Home schooling probably magnified a sociopathic streak.

His loving mother lived a quiet life, although it is curious why she collected so many firearms. Three more guns were found in the home where the sociopath killed his mother before driving over to the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut to kill many more.

Twenty children and six adults were killed in that gory, numbing incident in a rural American town. All the dead children were aged six to seven and each appeared to have been shot twice.

How could this young man be so misshapen that he could find the evil to shoot little children?

This is more than an attack on a school. It is an assault on the common humanity we share.

This event more than shatters a strong and decent community. It is a wound on the common civility we share. 

This tragedy is clearly more than just an individual’s emotional infirmity. It is the latest in a series of traumatic rampages, mostly involving vulnerable schools, by gun-wielding, deeply disturbed individuals. This is not just about psychology. It is also about policy.

There are more firearms in the hands of private citizens than there are people in the US. Gun ownership is a constitutionally protected right in this bastion of rugged individualism and entrepreneurship. Most homes have guns — and consequently, the most disturbed individuals have easy access to weapons.

Americans jealously guard the right to bear arms. It will never be an easy thing to restrict access to guns in the US. The strong pro-gun lobby intimidates the political class and no administration has put curbs on gun ownership high on its agenda.

What happened in Newtown reignites the debate on gun control more than any of the previous rampages did. This does not, however, assure us that the prevailing policy that brings assault rifles to the hands of common citizens will be changed.

Politicians rarely challenge firmly held public beliefs. Gun ownership is one such firmly held belief in the US. It could take many more senseless murders to undermine the present public orthodoxy about guns.

That might be the real tragedy here.

Ill-equipped

We have a real calamity to attend to closer to home. The death toll in eastern Mindanao surpassed the 1,000 mark. Nearly as many as those confirmed killed remain missing.

Entire communities were stripped of their livelihood and will be dependent on relief for months to come. In these communities, children are sick and a rising number are malnourished. Many of those injured have not had medical attention for many days. The zone of calamity is now vulnerable to outbreaks of disease.

Our own first responders performed heroically and volunteers on the ground work around the clock to keep the flow of support to the victims. The scale is large and the terrain is uncooperative. Infrastructure is damaged and equipment is deficient. The heroic effort is curtailed by shortages of almost everything.

I have seen glowing commendations of individual efforts, but have not seen any praise for the overall efforts of government. There is no one clearly in charge of a rescue and relief operation that requires the best logistics management.

A significant number of lives might have been saved if we had more helicopters deployed to pull out stragglers from the air and bring to proper hospitals those who needed medical attention. The misery now endured might have been greatly reduced if government was better able to deliver assistance from the air.

In calamities like this one, time is of the essence. Starving communities cannot wait for relief transported by sea and then trucked over barely passable roads.

It is shocking to find out that the Philippine Air Force presently has only 16 usable Huey helicopters. Most of those are deployed in other parts of the country. There is no report about how many are now in use in the devastated ComVal and Davao Oriental communities.

That fact alone greatly slowed the rescue and relief operation involving hundreds of thousands in dire need.

It is not that we could not procure choppers. Congress approved a hefty P75 billion AFP modernization budget for the years 2012-2017. During the launch of the Defense Acquisition System (DAS) January this year, Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin boldly declared his commitment to “the approval and signature of the contracts for all 138 projects for the AFP modernization and capability upgrade program not later than July 31, 2012.”

Well, it now late December. Not one of the 138 priority contracts is signed. All the DND reports is the bidding failure for 21 Huey choppers and the collapse of negotiations to purchase 10 French Eurocopters.

Had the procurement happened according to Gazmin’s schedule, we might have had at least two dozen new choppers available for deployment in the calamity-stricken areas in Mindanao. That deployment will have mattered greatly for the ill-fated communities.

Like much else in this administration, AFP modernization is way behind schedule and progressing, if it at all does, at a very slow pace. The Defense Secretary owes the public an explanation — at the very least to dispel ugly rumors about why everything is being held up at the DND.