EDITORIAL - Knee-jerk reactions

All over the country, there’s now a flurry of legislative proposals to prevent a repeat of the Tacloban school shooting incident that killed three students and hurt 20 others. But while some ideas are sound, others fall short of the mark or are even ridiculous.

For instance, the proposal to ban students from playing violent video games. Violent video games became the whipping boy following the Tacloban incident and it became the focus of many who solely blamed it for what happened.

However, we have already mentioned here about how there’s no direct evidence that playing violent video games --something that students of a generation past did for a long time-- triggers students to kill.

Now here comes a move from Dagupan, Pangasinan, to close pisonet shops, those small cafés offering internet service to students for a set time for a corresponding fee, so the students’ exposure to online games can be limited.

This is well and good, if pisonet services only catered to online games. But they don’t.

For many students who don’t have a computer at home and have to do research or print learning materials on the spot, the pisonet café is their only solution.

In Cebu City, there’s also a proposal to equip schools with metal-detecting wands, the same used by security guards in checking people coming into commercial establishments.

This would be ideal, but searching every bag of every student who comes to school would take forever. Imagine the long queues that will be formed as students and bags have to be checked one by one. And these are students who are actually trying not to be late to school.

Of course, it’s not just the students who have to be checked right? The same will have to be done to faculty, visitors, and practically anyone who is going into a school.

Yes, the situation and the rules have changed and we must do our best to keep our schools safe, but we must refrain from solutions that can possibly create more problems.