We now know the fatal and tragic consequences of blindly arming career goons and gorillas who, inept and unable to employ reason or rationality, think with their guns and gonads.

Taking hostages at the point of a gun in place of a microphone and eventually peppering innocents with bullet holes will not be the last we will see of this. Unfortunately, so will continue equally inane and violent resolutions. The recent tragedy is simply just another in a series of absurd episodes as we careen down the path of mind-numbing violence. Behind it, we fear, is our terribly warped martial culture, insidiously permeating from the benign and spreading openly to the most malignant.

The helipad beside the tennis court of a plush resort barely an hour from the metropolis had nothing worth stealing. Despite being nestled among well-kept walkways and gardens a quarter of a mile from the road, the deserted court was patrolled by a diminutive armed guard carrying a shotgun.

Alarmed albeit amused, the prospective investors ferried by the helicopter were looking at the Philippines as a possible manufacturing hub for computer peripherals. But peace and order must be elusive. What could possibly justify deadly ordnance in an empty tennis court? The same holds for fast-food joints, bookstores and daycare centers inside malls.

In a posh residential enclave in the heart of the city, one that hosts one of the best and most exclusive schools operated by the religious, an army of pistol-toting guards brandish deadly armaments like gunslingers. Daily, they crudely shout, yell and whistle at parents, drivers and nannies who drop off and pick up children along the school’s fortress-high walls.

Their priorities are warped. Save for a handful, the army of guards seems more concerned that cars speed away from momentary congestion than they are with the children’s safety. In grunt-fashion they force children to squeeze dangerously between towering SUV’s as they press the traffic to quickly move on.

Many guards are former policemen with minimum education. Some are academy rejects. Worse, the caliber of their deadly ordnance surpasses cumulative IQs as the martial gene is predominant. To this day, fetchers remember when one of them was violently run over by a vehicle apparently allowed by fawning guards to speed in the opposite direction because the truck was part of a politician’s entourage.

While the blood on the curb was quickly washed off, for the young and impressionable minds that witnessed the incident, the memory stains a bit longer.

Obviously there is a disconnect between the values nurtured inside the school’s walls and those outside representing a martial culture that distorts our society.

Simply ask how many toddlers would rather become policemen than doctors, engineers, lawyers or teachers. Ask why and invariably the gun becomes a focal point.

It does not take grainy cell phone video footage replayed on national TV to realize how warped and decayed our society has become. Indeed, we are nauseated by the images of a man treated as far less human, twitching in pain, screaming his last cries before death might mercifully set in to end the brutality inflicted by those, nurtured first and then virtually charged by our tax pesos.

We are nauseated not by the images, but by the realization that this is what we’ve tolerated for far too long. This is what happens before those decaying bodies turn up in dumpsites and along the water’s edge with signboards tied around their necks, extremities cut off and torsos pockmarked with cigarette burns and bullet holes.

It is nothing new. There lies the problem. The word “salvage” we’ve coined for such acts is by now colloquial, commonplace and cliché – long integrated into our crass crudity that diminishes the criminality behind the act but not less than the societal rot we all wallow in.

The etymology is from the Latin salus that means welfare or safety. When used as an adjective, the word turns into salvus. That adjective, when combined with a noun such as legis or law turns into salva lege meaning “without violating the law”. It is interesting to see how far we’ve fallen from our Roman bases in democracy and law.

We now know that those who inflicted the torture and possibly the death of the man in the footage were entrusted, armed and authorized to protect society and install justice as we would have it. We call them law enforcers and we know them by different names and under different degrees - from barangay tanods or village guardians, to security guards and night watchmen, to the military and the police. These are the men who constitute that part of our society we’ve purposely carved out from society’s underside, empowered, entitled, armed and called martial.