In just one week, Dumaguetenos were temporarily startled by two bomb threats. One was reported at the Hall of Justice last Wednesday, and another one was reported at the Colegio de Sta. Catalina de Alejandria (COSCA) last Thursday. Interestingly, there was also a widely-circulated hoax text message last Wednesday that a passenger plane from Dumaguete had crashed while enroute to Manila.
There are pranksters and there are pranksters. And there are limits as to what prank to pull, and what not to pull. To make bomb threats is already going beyond the boundary of healthy and clean fun. The comical series seen on TV involving hidden cameras and subjecting people to absurd situations may be okay because no one is injured and the victims are immediately informed that this was merely a hidden-camera trick.
But in a bomb threat, people could be hurt in resulting panic to get out of the building. Also, there is no way for the victims to tell if the threat was indeed a joke or if it was real. They just have to wait and wait for the bomb disposal squad to give the all-clear signal.
These threats easily spread by text messaging because anyone can buy a sim card and send out any kind of message. There should be a law requiring the registration of sim cards. This is not difficult to do. Cellphone companies can simply de-activate unregistered cards.
The frequency of these bomb threats indicate that the perpetrators have no fear of being found out.
Interestingly, this complements an observation made by the Traffic Management Office in Dumaguete that we now have more unruly drivers in our streets. Worse, more than 10,000 traffic citation tickets have been ignored by the erring drivers.
The government can stop these misdeeeds if it wants to. Let’s see if they really mean business.