Last month, there was a shooting at a school in the Philippines. It came on the heels of a shooting at a school in Thailand just a couple of weeks before.
Now, there's been another, this time in the Philippines again, and it's time to have a conversation anti-gunners aren't going to like.
See, these are three high-profile shootings at schools in Asia, which have strict gun control laws on the books. Much stricter, in fact, than anything that would survive constitutional muster here in the United States.
And they've got a problem.
Gun crime is not uncommon in the Philippines, which has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the region. Broadly speaking, school shootings are rare, but today's incident marks the third deadly campus shooting in the last four months.
In June, three students were killed and more were injured after their peers opened fire at a high school in central Philippines. Investigators believed the deadly shooting had been motivated by a "grudge" over bullying.
In August, a student at a Catholic junior high school in the southern Philippines shot dead a fellow student and later took his own life. In this case, the suspect had fired at the teacher, but missed, then moved to another classroom and shot a student, who later died.
Thailand, likewise, has a whole lot of guns, a whole lot of laws saying they shouldn't, and a whole lot of violent crime to match up with that...including the mass public shootings that we're told over and over again only happen here.
You see, it's funny how often the very people who criticize us for believing that the United States is great, claiming we're too myopic to the rest of the world, will make claims about how something that happens all over the world only happens here.
No, they only pay attention when it happens here, and only when it's convenient.
And that's not even getting to the violence in parts of Africa or South America, where armed gangs do pretty much whatever they want in some parts of these countries.
So-called gun violence is bad here compared to many of our peers, but look at where it generally happens? In places that the authorities can't control and where gangs are often able to do whatever they want without fear of a governmental response.
"This kind of thing doesn't happen in other countries" is the most myopic, brain-dead thing a person can say, especially when we get reports like these out of Asia.
Since August 1, we've seen three such shootings. The United States has had only one. That despite a population difference of about 340 million Americans to just under 190 million people living in the two countries combined. I wish we hadn't had ours and I wish Thailand and the Philippines hadn't had theirs, but it happened.
And it's dumb to claim "it only happens here" or any other such gum-flapping nonsense.
It might actually be better to find potential cultural parallels that might exist and study those to see if maybe, just maybe, we're dealing with a mental illness no one has bothered to diagnose yet, some cultural kind of thing that can be addressed through education, or literally anything else on the entire freaking planet than screaming about gun control.
After all, the Philippines and Thailand have it. Most countries throughout the world have it.
It just doesn't do a damn bit of good when kids can steal secured guns and shoot people. People will want guns and need them by whatever means a government says are legitimate. That means there's an avenue for gun acquisition if you don't care too much about legalities, and kids who intend to kill their peers rarely care all that much about such frivolous things as legalities.
