The disturbed young man who mercilessly slaughtered 27 people, 20 of them small children, in Connecticut last week is now being reported to have suffered from Aperger's Sydrome, described as a “high functioning form of autism” by the New York Times. His mental illness and his easy access to firearms – his mother, whom police said he had killed before he went on his shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, was a gun enthusiast – may have pushed Adam Lanza to do what he did, authorities now say.

The potentially disastrous combination of unreported and untreated mental disorders on the part of the perpetrators of mass shootings and the ridiculous availability of firearms in the United States have been blamed for most of these incidents in the past. Because there are precious few statistics about the number of outwardly normal but inwardly disturbed persons even in the US, the authorities are left to focus on gun-control legislation – which, to their credit, seem to have worked to make such mass shootings very rare in other Westernized countries.

In this country, gun-related violence is also common, even if there are few incidents of mass shootings perpetrated by disturbed persons acting alone. When many people are killed in one place in the Philippines, it is mostly due to the deliberate action of many people acting in concert, as in the so-called Ampatuan Massacre; either that, or a natural calamity has taken place, like the arrival of an unseasonal typhoon in a mostly cyclone-free area.

Most incidents involving the use of firearms here are perpetrated by criminals, who range from cellular phone stickup men to armed-to-the-teeth robbery gangs who attack banks, foreign exchange shops and other “high-value” targets. The ones with unreported mental illness thankfully do not go on killing rampages – although they may actually cause greater damage when they get elected to high government office.

When these people “act out” in this country, their actions may cause less blood to flow than the depredations of a mass shooter in the US. But their official actions can be no less devastating, regardless of whether they take up the high-powered weapons that they also enjoy using.

This is why it is important to require everyone seeking high office in this country to undergo psychiatric testing, whether they are applying for the chief justiceship of the Supreme Court or even the presidency of the Republic. We have enough problems without having to be at the mercy of high officials with Asperger's Syndrome or worse, whether or not they indulge in a love for high-powered weaponry.

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President Noynoy Aquino seems hell-bent on dividing the entire country on the issue of his pet reproductive health law, which is now awaiting third and final reading over at the House of Representatives. Other Presidents, after all, who see how a favorite legislative proposal of theirs has caused such a divisive uproar would conceivably have stopped to listen, if not to the lack of unanimity in Congress, then to the people themselves, who are being torn apart by contradictory positions.

Not Aquino, obviously. After the uncomfortably narrow 113-104 second reading vote in the House (with 64 congressmen absent) in favor of the RH measure, the President has decided to put the pedal to the metal, to use a figure of speech the car buff in Malacanang would be familiar with.

Aquino has certified the RH measure as urgent, which he hopes will also have the effect of speeding up the approval on second reading of a similar measure in the Senate, apart from clinching the House's OK on third reading. If Aquino had played coy in the past about his support for RH, he has thrown all pretense aside this time around, when he feels that victory is within reach.

In the meantime, the voting in both chambers, which many Congress observers are saying could favor the pro-RH advocates, could get even closer than it was before. The Catholic bishops, who are backing the anti-RH legislators, have decided to stage a full-court press of their own, in an effort to block approval on third reading in the House and to convince the Senate not to pass their own measure during the critical second reading.

Still, the question has to be asked: why does Aquino want to get Congress to pass his RH measure despite the obvious resistance in and out of the House and the Senate? Is he willing to alienate large chunks of the population and Congress just so he gets his law before opposition to it grows?

Why the mad rush to approve something that so obviously doesn't have the support of a clear majority? Shouldn't the opposition to RH force Aquino to reconsider and review his position, instead of causing a deepening of the divide between the pros and the antis?

But if Aquino lets opposition to his plans and priorities slow him down or reverse course altogether, then he wouldn't be Aquino, would he? This President, more than any in recent memory, is only too willing to ignore those who do not agree with him, when he isn't blaming them for what's wrong and accusing them of being unpatriotic, corrupt or negative.

It's like that yellow ribbon he wears all the time on his breast: he knows it irritates the hell out of people who believe he should unite the nation instead of dividing it into those who agree with him and those who don't – but he wears it anyway, secure in the belief that there are enough who support him to nullify those who don't.

Very well, then, Mr. President: divide away. But don't be surprised when your lack of talent for consensus and compromise makes opposition to you grow and consolidate, as is already happening in Congress.

You may wake up one day to find that those who oppose you have become the new majority – and by then it will be too late to do anything about it.*