Let’s keep it a hundred: what happened at San Jose National High School in Tacloban City is a straight-up tragedy. Three young students lost their lives and 20 others got shot up when two teenagers opened fire. That is heavy, real-world pain. But instead of looking at the real issues—like how two kids aged 14 and 15 managed to grab actual straps in a country flooded with unlicensed guns—the suits in the government are trying to blame a mobile phone game called GoreBox.

The Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC) put a temporary block on the game because they found out one of the shooters was a regular player. GoreBox is an R18+ game on Google Play made by F2 Games that has over 10 million downloads. It is full of guns, explosives, and realistic rag-doll physics where things get messy. But let’s be real—millions of kids play these games every single day on their phones and never think about hurting a soul in real life.

Even science backs this up. Major academic studies have looked into this over and over, and they keep finding zero proof that playing a violent game makes you a violent person in the real world. A big meta-analysis from 2020 showed that the long-term impact of these games on kid aggression is "near zero." But CICC Undersecretary Aboy Paraiso is out here telling the public they "cannot ignore possible online influences." It sounds like a major cop-out to avoid dealing with the actual failures on the ground.

If you want to know why this happened, you have to look at the streets and the schools, not the app store. Police interviews with the grade 9 suspects revealed they were being heavily bullied at school, and they took matters into their own hands as retribution. That’s a failure of the school system to protect these kids from being pushed to the absolute edge. On top of that, the Philippines has a massive issue with unlicensed firearms. It is way too easy for a teenager to get a real gun, and that is a problem of law enforcement, not software developers.

Instead of focusing on that, the Department of Justice is trying to sound smart, saying they are looking into whether this is "nihilistic violent extremism." They define that as doing crazy violence without any real ideological reason. But you don't need a fancy definition to understand what happens when you mix severe bullying, a total lack of mental health support, and easy access to weapons. It’s a recipe for disaster, plain and simple.

This isn't even just about guns. The Commission on Human Rights pointed out that school violence is spiking all over, including two separate stabbing incidents within the same week at Cavite National High School and Bethel Academy of General Trias in Cavite. Knives don't require an internet connection or a mobile download to work. Kids are hurting each other because they are stressed, unsupported, and living in violent environments.