IT IS TIME TO BAN FOOTBALL!! (please follow link to original)
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TPM Editor’s Blog

Junior Seau, 1969-2012

It’s not been officially confirmed yet, but local media is reporting that former NFL great Junior Seau, whose gridiron glory came mostly as a San Diego Charger, committed suicide in his Oceanside, Calif., home.
The kicker, for anyone who has been following the epidemic of long-term neurological damage suffered by former NFL players, is that Seau apparently killed himself with a gunshot to the chest. That’s an early report from the usually reliable North County Times, citing an unnamed source, so I don’t want to get ahead of the facts. (And in fact the Los Angeles Times is reporting that it was a gunshot wound to the head.) But it is reminiscent of the death of former Chicago Bear Dave Duerson, who also shot himself in the chest and asked in his suicide note that his brain be turned over to the NFL study group examining the long-term effects of football-related brain injuries.
It was later confirmed that Duerson was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the trauma-induced brain disease that cannot be diagnosed pre-mortem and which has been found in a number of former NFL players, many of whom have died relatively young.