🇹🇭 Anutin vows gun reforms, but radicalisation questions linger

Hello friends,

A longer, sadder one today. Tragedies in Thailand, the Philippines and Myanmar really set a tone, while Indonesia is getting weird.

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Erin Cook

I think any reader of this newsletter would’ve been hard-pressed to miss the staggering news from Bangkok on Friday. A 14-year-old student of the Debsirin Nonthaburi School shot and killed his grandparents before heading to school, killing staff and a 12-year-old girl before killing himself. The death toll stands at nine, including the shooter.

Channel News Asia did a really great job with its liveblog covering the events and the immediate aftermath, and I’d recommend that hard read if you’re after a refresher.

I held off on a newsletter about this because I wanted to see what Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul and his government would do. I’ve run this newsletter project for about a decade now, and the scale of gun violence in Thailand has consistently been a regional outlier. The gun-toting Philippines still outpaces Thailand in overall gun violence, but I do think it’s of a different nature. These enormous, shocking stories do not happen with annual regularity there.

Vows to reform gun laws have not been consequential enough, and tweaks to the legislation clearly have not worked. The 14-year-old shooter last week reportedly took the guns from his grandfather, who legally owned them. This tragedy appears to have lit a fire under the arse of Anutin’s government. The issuance of gun permits has been stopped as the PM promises tighter controls to come, BBC reports.

There are emerging reports that this teenage assailant had been consuming radical content online, of which flavour I do not know, and I am very, very curious to learn more about this. The Siam Paragon shooting back in 2023, in which another 14-year-old male shot and killed two people in the mall, had a deliberate Columbine look to it. We still have a lot to learn here about Friday’s tragedy, but if we do find it fits part of the Siam Paragon-North Jakarta school bomb-Filipino interventions list, I think we’re in trouble.

Natasha May and Khemmapat Rojwanichkun have run a piece in the Guardian this week that might have the year’s most moving lede. The piece recounts the funeral of Naphat Chaimar, the 12-year-old victim, and the moment Nithi Yimruang, the father of the 14-year-old assailant, arrived to pray and apologise to her family. It was accepted.

While Thailand grappled with the enormity of this, it happened again. Former lawmaker Chalong Riewraeng was arrested on Monday, and he confessed to shooting and killing local politician Thongchai Yenprasert at a government office on the edge of Bangkok, DW reports here.

Monstrous flooding across the northern parts of the Philippines has left at least 16 dead, officials said on Monday. Rainfall over nine days has been the equivalent of more than a month’s worth for some parts of the country, rescuers said as per the AFP. It triggered landslides, with one disaster in Baguiao accounting for seven of the overall deaths.

I have seen a lot of fury in the reporting and online of communities hit by this — the misuse of funds allocated to the mitigation of flooding projects across the Philippines is central to an ever-simmering corruption scandal which is still to be resolved, even as people drown in mud and garbage.

“Our interventions are continuing, but we really need to fix the years and decades’ worth of faulty flood mitigation interventions,” Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon told media on Monday. Great. Get on that then.

The Associated Press has run a stunning collection of photos from their Manila photojournalist, Aaron Favila. There are a few cute dogs in here, but the real jaw-droppers are the amount of garbage flowing into waterways that rescuers and residents alike are having to navigate.

That dull noise you heard last night was the brains of Indonesia and Taiwan watchers audibly exploding like Pop Rocks in a child’s mouth. Jeeze, here we go. Indonesia will team up with China for naval patrols later this month in ‘waters east of Taiwan,’ Bloomberg reports. The two navies have held joint exercises before, no worries, but it’s the first time China has teamed up with anyone in those waters. A start date hasn’t been announced, and Indonesia’s Defence Minister hasn’t said much of anything at all just yet.

I had a peek over at what Global Times has to say this morning, and it’s hardly the fine art of tea leaf reading. “Inviting foreign naval vessels to conduct training in waters under China’s own jurisdiction is normal and reasonable. The act also demonstrates that China has sovereign rights and jurisdiction over these waters. The relevant scope of China’s sovereignty and maritime rights and interests includes the territorial waters east of Taiwan island, as well as the exclusive economic zone and continental shelf,” military affairs expert Zhang Junshe told the outlet yesterday.

• ‘President’ Min Aung Hlaing’s visit to Thailand was tragically overshadowed by the shooting. I daresay he’d still call it a success. AFP (via Frontier Myanmar) has an interesting piece here on the visit as a stepping stone towards being welcomed back into the Asean fold. Call it “a pathway for normalisation of relations with others, including Western countries that have remained opposed to the military regime,” Morgan Michaels, Myanmar expert at IISS, said. While in Bangkok, Thai officials held a business forum for Min Aung Hlaing as well as a formal dinner.

• A report released yesterday by the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar found that the military increased aerial strikes ahead of the December-January ‘election’ period. The strikes have since “continued unabated,” the report noted. The whole thing is deeply disturbing, and I’ll just quote directly from Reuters here: ‘The IIMM’s annual report, covering July 2025 to June 2026, documented a pattern of deliberate aerial attacks on civilians, arbitrary detentions, torture and sexual violence committed by the Myanmar military.’ Hope you enjoyed Bangkok as much as you could, Min Aung Hlaing, because you’ll be ending up in hell!

• Flooding across the Sagaing, Mandalay, Magway, and Ayeyarwady regions has left at least 16 dead and affected 400,000, the National Unity Government said as per Myanmar Now. The communities hit include those already displaced due to fighting, the NUG added. Community aid groups are struggling to respond to the crisis and say they’re in desperate need of food aid and medicine as well as motorboats to distribute them. NUG also flagged that the state of agricultural land around Sagaing and Ayeyarwady regions has been devastated, which will likely compound the crises in the coming months.