The country’s rising toll of gun-related crime traces back to a single legal change, Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla argued Wednesday, August 19, faulting a decades-old statute that loosened the penalty for possessing unlicensed weapons.
Remulla pointed to what he called the “Robin Padilla law” as the root of the problem, saying its softening of the rules removed a deterrent that once kept offenders behind bars. “The ‘Robin Padilla law (Republic Act No. 8294),’ which extinguished culpability and made it a bailable offense, has led to a surge of crimes, precisely because loose firearms is a bailable offense,” he told reporters at a Camp Crame press briefing.
He backed the claim with a figure the department had reviewed. “We went through the numbers: 98% of gun crimes are committed with loose firearms,” Remulla said, casting the statistic as evidence that the law’s leniency had opened the door to abuse rather than curbed it.
The remedy he pressed on Congress was a reversal: restore the non-bailable classification that governed illegal possession before the amendment, which he framed as the missing check that once made the offense preventable.
The statute Remulla singled out carries a contested label. RA 8294, passed in 1997, amended Presidential Decree No. 1866 and lowered the penalties for the illegal possession, manufacture, and disposition of firearms. Padilla, now a senator, held no seat in Congress when it took effect; the informal name stuck to him because he retroactively benefited from the lighter penalty following an earlier firearms conviction, as fact-checking outlet tsek.ph has noted. Coverage of the briefing diverged on this point — Inquirer and GMA News tied the nickname instead to RA 11766, an amendment to the Comprehensive Firearms and Ammunition Regulation Act, a different law altogether.
Beyond the bail question, Remulla flagged what he sees as a loophole shielding negligent gun owners. When a minor takes a legally registered firearm from a parent or guardian and uses it, he said, the owner faces only a reckless imprudence charge, with no separate penalty for the possession that made the weapon available in the first place. Given that loose firearms drive nearly all gun crime by the department’s count, he argued, enforcement should now bear down on the people who hold those weapons.
His appeal landed a day after a shooting at the junior high school campus of Ateneo de Zamboanga University in Barangay Tumaga, Zamboanga City, where a student killed a schoolmate before turning the gun on himself — the second such attack on a Philippine campus in about two months, following a June shooting in Tacloban. Remulla has said one of the firearms used in Zamboanga had been issued by the Bureau of Customs.
The position echoes earlier warnings from within law enforcement. In 2011, then-Philippine National Police chief Nicanor Bartolome had likewise argued that illegal firearm possession should be treated as a non-bailable offense after a string of shootings.
