The Interior Secretary’s proposal to spend ₱6 billion on a “comprehensive national ID system” supposedly to curb gun ownership is less a policy breakthrough than a familiar exercise in bureaucratic misdirection.
It is difficult to treat such reasoning with seriousness. Firearm ownership in the Philippines is already among the most heavily documented civilian activities in the country. Licensing requirements include police and NBI clearances, drug and neuro-psychiatric testing, firearm registration, serial tracking, and ballistics profiling. Legal gun owners are not operating in anonymity. They are, in fact, among the most identifiable individuals in the regulatory landscape.
The notion that an additional ID system is the missing mechanism for gun control is therefore not only redundant—it is conceptually incoherent. If the state cannot enforce the safeguards already embedded in existing firearm regulation, it is unclear why layering yet another costly infrastructure on top of institutional weakness would produce a different outcome.
What the proposal does offer, however, is scale: ₱6 billion is not an administrative improvement, but a procurement universe. In a country where “systems projects” have repeatedly become synonymous with inefficiency, overpricing, and corruption, such figures do not inspire confidence. They invite suspicion.
The Philippines has long exhibited a reflexive tendency to substitute governance with technology, enforcement with infrastructure, and accountability with expenditure. When confronted with real institutional failures—illegal firearms, smuggling networks, private armies, regulatory corruption—the response is too often a new database, a new platform, a new multi-billion peso program. Modernization becomes performance, and reform becomes procurement.
Gun violence is not an identification deficit. It is an enforcement deficit. It is a corruption deficit. It is the product of selective law application, political tolerance for armed power, and institutional decay. Illegal firearms do not disappear because the government prints a better card. Criminal networks do not dissolve because Congress funds another system.
The more relevant question, then, is not whether the country needs another ID mechanism, but why officials persist in proposing expensive bureaucratic expansions while the fundamentals remain unaddressed.
If the objective is public safety, the path is clear: dismantle private armies, prosecute smuggling, clean up licensing agencies, and enforce existing laws without fear or favor.
If the objective is something else—another spending channel, another contract ecosystem—then the language of “gun control” becomes merely a convenient justification.
In the Philippines, citizens have learned to be cautious when government announces a “comprehensive system” worth billions. Too often, the system serves itself long before it serves the public.
The country does not need another card. It needs a state capable of doing the basic work of governance.
