Rather than hunting for a lone trigger behind the deadly shooting at Ateneo de Zamboanga University, clinical psychiatrist Dr. Randy Dellosa is pressing schools, parents and law enforcement to watch closely for behavioral red flags — and to brace for the possibility that other troubled young people may try to imitate what happened.
Dellosa laid out several factors he believes investigators should be weighing at once. These include deep-seated resentments, the ability to get hold of guns, an unhealthy interest in earlier campus attacks, and the pull of certain online circles. He also pointed to a phenomenon specialists refer to as “leakage of intention” — moments when a person hints at violent plans to someone else or broadcasts them on the internet ahead of an attack.
He was firm that pinning the blame on gaming misses the point. After it emerged that the shooter had played Counter-Strike, Dellosa pushed back on that line of reasoning. “There are many Counter-Strike players, Roblox players, but they don’t necessarily become shooters,” he said, arguing that an event this grave cannot be flattened into a single cause.
The weapons themselves are a separate worry. The August 18 attack killed the gunman and one student and left roughly two dozen others hurt, making it the country’s second deadly campus shooting in under two months — the first having struck San Jose National High School in Tacloban City in June. That closeness in time, Dellosa noted, has left many students, teachers and families on edge, with some now uneasy about the classmates sitting right next to them.
Both firearms in the Zamboanga case, according to police accounts, came from a vehicle belonging to the shooter’s father, a Bureau of Customs police official assigned to the city’s port. One was a Glock issued to him by the agency; the other was his own licensed handgun. On this point Dellosa was blunt: any gun owner living with children needs to treat storage and security as a non-negotiable priority.
He was equally troubled by how widely clips of the assault spread online. Fixating on the attacker and recirculating that footage, he warned, risks nudging others who may already be entertaining violent thoughts. His appeal to newsrooms was to pull attention away from perpetrators and to hold back on granular descriptions of how such attacks unfold. The focus, in his view, belongs with the victims and the wider school community absorbing the shock.
His broader argument is that leaning on any one culprit — a video game, a piece of technology — will not keep students safe. Spotting worrying behavior early, locking up firearms, staying aware of what children do online and treating warning signals as genuine threats are, taken together, the kind of layered effort he says real prevention demands.
