Reporting Colorado-Style Shooting Unlikely In Philippines Belies Brutal Reality

Horrific Murder and Felony Firearm in Flint, Michigan: Three Family Members Charged, iStock-1138299265
Reporting Colorado-Style Shooting Unlikely In Philippines Belies Brutal Reality. iStock-1138299265

USA –-(Ammoland.com)- Philippine police say mass shootings similar to the one at the Aurora, Colo., theater are unlikely due to the nation’s strict gun control laws, ABS-CBNnews.com reported Saturday.

“Philippine National Police (PNP) spokesman, Chief Superintendent Generoso Cerbo Jr., said the Philippines has stringent measures regulating the sale of firearms,” the story reports. “He added that it is unusual in Filipino culture to engage in such violent activity.”

What Chief Superintendent Cerbo and the reporters for the news division of the Phillipines-based global media conglomerate who are taking his claims at face value don’t mention is the Maguindanao Massacre, committed less than three years ago, when mass graves containing 57 bodies, were found. Unarmed victims of an ambush were shot or taken hostage for execution as their convoy was going to file a political challenge against Andal Ampatuan, Jr., the son of an incumbent governor seeking to succeed his father, and who was subsequently arrested and held for trial until the Department of Justice dropped charges citing insufficient evidence.

This blind faith note-taking and regurgitation by “reporters” is curious, because among the dead were 34 journalists, abducted and slaughtered in the massacre, billed as “the deadliest single attack on the press ever documented” by the Committee to Protect Journalists, which “had earlier branded the Philippines the second most dangerous place for journalists in the world behind Iraq.”

The massacre also included 22 female victims the convoy was counting on “to avoid violence,” as rivals traditionally “call for a ceasefire when women are involved, and in the presence of media.”

“Practically all” of the women had been shot in the genitals and evidence points to their having been raped before being killed. Another account lists the number of females dead at 24, adding that some were beheaded and one was pregnant.

Further, the initial attack took place at a police checkpoint, where attending PNP officers, that is, Superintendent Cerbo’s branch of government, were helpless to stop “a group of about 100 armed men.” In a bizarre side note, it appears a government-owned backhoe was used to dig the mass graves, with a provincial engineer employee being named the suspect operator.

As “testament” to the “stringent measures” against guns Superintendent Cerbo cited as guarantees against Aurora-style massacres, along with his cited dearth of cultural violence, it is reported that “investigators were currently performing ballistics and macro-etching examinations on 429 firearms recovered from four deactivated paramilitary forces in the province. These firearms consist of 101 units of M14 rifles, 303 units of M1 Garand rifles, 25 units of M1 Carbines, and some 5,100 rounds of assorted ammunition recovered from deactivated civilian volunteer forces in the province.”

This is despite Philippine gun laws being categorized as “restrictive” by the academic and intelligence research site, GunPolicy.org, which further reveals edicts “gun control” proponents are demanding for implementation in the U.S., such as licensing, registration, storage laws, marking, “ballistic fingerprinting” and severe penalties for illegal possession of a firearm, are all part of the scheme administered by Cerbo’s PNP, which somehow cannot explain why “The number of registered guns in the Philippines is reported to be 775,000” while “The estimated total number of guns held by civilians in the Philippines is 3,900,000.”

The final outrage: Three weeks ago, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported “The Philippine National Police admits it is having a tough time hunting down 101 suspects in the 2009 Maguindanao massacre who remain at large, in the wake of reports of witnesses or their relatives getting killed one by one.”

Armed violence in the Philippines, political and otherwise, is ongoing, much of it perpetrated by the very government Superintendent Cerbo represents. The most cursory of internet news searches bears that out. And by way of comparison, per The Guardian’s analysis of United Nations data, the homicide rate per 100,000 people is 21 in Cerbo’s “stringent” paradise, while the “lax” U.S. is dwarfed at 5.9.

That the corporate “Authorized Journalists” faithfully parroting nonsensical, politically-motivated “Only Ones” talking points without question, and without even a reference to reports that any qualified and responsible professional reporting from the region would be knowledgeable of, points either to utter incompetence, an agenda to mislead, or both. That ABS-CBN is a Filipino “news” provider shows the practice of media manipulation on the Aurora shootings is global in scope. It’s yet one more exhibit to be introduced in the self-inflicted indictment of mainstream journalism, here and abroad, as new media’s “Unauthorized Journalists” inform and remind the public of what the “professionals,” with their resources, staffs, editors, and budgets, will not.

Not only gun rights advocates, but many more Americans and others around the world, are waking up to this reality in the media-feeding frenzy following the Aurora shootings. They are learning that characterizations such as “lazy and inept” barely scratch the surface of what Fourth Estate Fifth Columnists are really up to.


About David Codrea

David Codrea is a long-time gun rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He is a field editor for GUNS Magazine, and a blogger at The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance. Read more at www.DavidCodrea.com.

David Codrea

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JD

Of course all similar incidents in the philippines have involved machine-guns and hand grenades and sometimes were carried out by police or government troops.