Arming civilian anti-crime volunteers as President Duterte suggests will result in more, not fewer crimes. This stark warning comes, not from a human rights activist, but from Senator Panfilo Lacson, who was chief of the national police from 1999 to 2001.
Arming civilians to fight criminality could backfire, especially if they don’t have the proper training and mindset, Lacson says, adding that stricter gun control measures by the police would be a better solution to criminality.
To bolster his case, Lacson cited recent abuses by off-duty policemen who were involved in fatal shootings—including Master Sergeant Hensie Zinampan who shot a 52-year-old woman in the back of the head in Fairview, Quezon City in May, a month after the victim’s son figured in a fist fight with him. A murder charge has been filed against Zinampan.
Another case, which Lacson did not mention, was a shooting incident at the Manila Police Department (MPD) headquarters on June 25, in which a drunk cop broke into his office at night to get a rifle, then shot and killed a colleague and wounded another before being shot dead himself by responding policemen.
“If our law enforcers who are supposed to be trained are prone to lapses, how much more in the case of untrained civilians?” Lacson asked.
But the senator isn’t the only one who thinks arming civilian volunteers is a bad idea.
“Arming civilians without proper training, qualification, and clear lines of accountability may lead to lawlessness and proliferation of arms that may further negatively impact the human rights situation in the country,” a spokesperson for the Commission on Human Rights said.
In 2012, a study entitled “Arming civilians for self-defense: the impact of firearms proliferation on the conflict dynamics in Southern Thailand” found that a government policy to arm civilian volunteer militias led to a sharp proliferation of firearms in the southernmost provinces, researchers found.
“The research findings brought to light the way in which firearms proliferation and the rise in the arming of civilians potentially escalates the conflict dynamics and contributes to ethno-religious polarization as well as to communal violence,” the study concluded.
In the United States where gun violence and mass shootings are rife, the data is there for anyone who wishes to see it.
A 1998 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that “every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.”
In 2017, Stanford Law School professor John Donohue found that states that adopted right-to-carry laws experienced a 13 percent to 15 percent increase in violent crime in the 10 years after enacting those laws.
It is germane to point out that Mr. Duterte, in seeking to arm civilian militias, wants to specifically target communist rebels in one of the world’s longest running insurgencies.
But the International Committee of the Red Cross, in a 1999 study, found that civilians have paid an appalling price for the widespread availability of weapons and ammunition.
“The unregulated transfer of weapons and ammunition can increase tensions, heighten civilian casualties and prolong the duration of conflicts,” the ICRC study said.
In Burkina Faso, where the government began civilians to fight jihadists in 2020, several things can go wrong, writes Sam Mednnick in The New Humanitarian.
First, there is a lack of oversight. Then there is an increased opportunity for revenge.
“The government can barely provide thorough oversight of its own military, and now you’re going to throw in a bunch of random groups that have absolutely no training,” one advocate for West and Central African refugees said. “We’re entering a time of absolute chaos in Burkina.”
The current PNP chief, Guillermo Eleazar, defends the President’s proposal to arm civilians, saying that the civilian volunteers would “undergo the rules and procedures for civilians to possess and carry firearms.” But we take little solace from the assurances of an official who cannot even stop drunk policemen from shooting and killing civilians and their own colleagues.
The objective may be to reduce crime, but in arming untrained and unsupervised civilian volunteers, this government is just asking for trouble.