The New York gunman blamed CTE. I’ve seen that pain and I know silence is deadly | NFL

FOur people lost their lives this week in an office building in Manhattan, shot dead in a place that I know well, by a man with a rifle and a three -page note blaming football and the brain diseases that she would have left. One of the victims was an officer of the NYPD on leave. Another was a blackstone setting. All were innocent. Everyone was just trying to go home, and thanks to Shane Tamura, 27, they never did.

I crossed these NFL offices. I sat in these rooms. I have friends who always work there, people who hold me deeply. And on the other hand, I have known people and people who have lost people who suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), not always to death, but with the isolation that accompanies it and slowly detangling the mind, body and mind. And I lost people because of armed violence. Too many of us have it.

So, when I read that the shooter claimed to suffer from CTE, that he was trying to reach the offices of the NFL and to take revenge on what he believed that the game had done to his brain, although he had never played at the professional level, I felt more than a shock. I felt sorrow. I felt rage. I felt an emergency that I cannot ignore, and you shouldn’t either.

This tragedy is not only a story on a man. Even in the three -page note of the shooter, he is his portfolio, he referred to Terry Long, a former NFL player who died by suicide and was later confirmed to the CTE, it is a warning of all that we still refuse to confront: how we treat brain trauma, the way we ignore mental illness Silence, football, politics and culture, continues to kill.

I know what it is to arm your own body.

I played Division I football in Purdue and I was later drafted at the Dallas Cowboys. I continued to play and start for the Buccaneers of Tampa Bay and the Buffalo Bills. I aligned myself through the temple of fame, I led my shoulder to men twice my size at impious speeds, and I felt my own skull shake in my helmet plated after the plate and the blow after the blow. In football, it was not a source of concern. It was a cause of celebration. I often remember that the teammates of veterinarians as young as the 12 -year -old veterinarians in the NFL often hide their concussion symptoms so as not to waste time on the ground, and too often, coaches and coaches encouraged, or at least, made their eyes on these circumstances. This does not mean that for each indifferent trainer, there was not a host of more diligent and cautious to check with them, but also, the athletes slip into the meshes of the net.

We were conditioned to treat pain as performance fuel. If you could continue to play, you did. You knock it, the ice, made it burst and keep you silent. But there is no quick solution for the brain. We called it tenacity. We called it loyalty. We called it team culture. But let’s be honest, it was a silent and slow bleeding. And for some of us, it never stopped.

I remember playing for the Buccaneers as a starter in 2017, dislocating my shoulder, tearing my labrum and breaking part of my collarbone, only to take two weeks off, medication, freeze and rehabilitate, so that I can play the rest of the season, missing a single match. Each week, while my teammates practiced for our next opponent and improved in their job, I rehabilitate my shoulder enough to be able to raise my arm alone-never above my head, and play again this week, repeating my own self-supporting. And I was thanked for that every week until it is expected from me by everyone in the organization. I was cut later in 2018 for this same injury, which had worsened well while playing.

It’s not something you’re talking about in the locker room. This is something that you whisper years later when a former teammate loses his marriage, disappears in depression or dies by suicide, of which I have personal stories. This is something that you fear that you appear in your own life as a ghost or the boogeyman, in an explosion of rage that you cannot explain, of the way your memory is blurring, in the calm moment, you wonder if your mind is moving away.

The man who opened fire in Manhattan did not play in the NFL. He played football in high school more than a decade. But the way he described his suffering in his last note, the way he named CTE and the League, and begged that his brain is studied: this language, this despair is familiar. I heard it. I lived it next to it. Some of my friends and lives of former teammates were ruined.

None of these apologies is for what he has done. Let me be absolutely clear: the victims of this attack did not deserve what happened to them. Their families, their communities and our country crying another act of insane violence. But if we do not look at what led him there, the culture of silence around brain trauma, lack of access to mental health care, the glorification of pain and masculinity in football, then we choose ignorance. And ignorance has never saved a single life.

Despite all its faults, the NFL is at least aware of prohibiting firearms and gestures resembling the violence of celebrations, but our country remains determined to refuse not only to prohibit real firearms, but also to actively release the laws on firearms under the current administration.

It was not just a question of CTE. It was also access. Shane Tamura led across the country with a file in her car and pain in her chest. He crossed the state lines, entered a corporate building in Manhattan and took four lives before taking his own. This kind of devastation does not occur without a weapon in hand, and in this country, this weapon is far too easy to obtain.

I lost people because of armed violence. The people who looked like me. People I called uncle, brother and friend. I could have been lost in the same fate, but I was lucky to have sport to escape. Football, virility and masculinity teach men to bottle what hurts, then America hands them a firearm when they finally explode. There are more regulations on affected celebrations and the content of social media than on which buys an AR-15.

Sorrow and condolences are not enough. Not this time. No more.

The NFL has taken measures, but it is time to double at all levels. Mental performance and mental well-being can no longer be a reflection afterwards in a sport built around pain. From the first padded training in football for young people to the last snapshot of a pro career, we must openly talk about trauma, identity, support and care, as well as regular projections of mental performance. Not only for stars. For everyone.

We must also carefully examine the laws that allow people like Tamura to move to this country with a weapon of war and without security nets. If it was the fuel, access to this rifle was the match. How many additional lives must be lost before our law on legislators? Before mental health and access to firearms were treated like connected crises, not isolated discussion points?

I speak because silence has already cost us too much. I was lucky. I went out with my body and my voice. But I know players who have not done so. I know communities that did not know.

So remember the names of the victims. DIDARUL Officer Islam. Wesley Lepatner. ALAND ETIENNE. And one more soul whose name we will learn too late. Do not reduce them to the headlines. Do not leave the systems that have failed them. And please don’t look away.