In the matter of the more than ordinarily mysterious suicide of the young (he was only 21) Washington State University hero quarterback, most people are talking about the recent autopsy finding that Hilinski already showed CTE. He had the brain of a sixty-five year old, the doctors said.

Which means scads of university football players in their twenties are probably running around with some degree of CTE. Hilinski after all was a quarterback, a position which typically receives less cerebral punishment than many others.

Et alors? Virtually no one in this country cares; they love football too desperately to give much notice to the early gruesome deaths of their gridiron heroes. People only noticed Hilinski because he wasn’t a mentally eviscerated former pro in his sixties, but still a kid. Same age as Owen Thomas.

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No, ol’ UD is more struck by Hilinski’s father’s comment up there in my headline. Hilinski’s father thinks it’s pretty fucking weird that his kid’s buddies in the dorm had an AR-15 style rifle. Handy, simple, 110% deadly – just the thing for an impulsively self-destructive guy who’d barely hit legal drinking age. (Almost all very young suicides are impulsive.) Hilinski had never handled a gun, but his clueless buddies were happy to give him some pointers, shortly after which he stole the AR-15 and – with this powerful weapon of war – blew his brains out. An incredibly violent bloody suicide, this one.

“We’re always going to have suicide,” [one researcher says,] “and there’s probably not that much to be done for the ones who are determined, who succeed on their 4th or 5th or 25th try. The ones we have a good chance of saving are those who, right now, succeed on their first attempt because of the lethal methods they’ve chosen.” … The element of impulsivity in firearm suicide means that it is a method in which mechanical intervention — or “means restriction” — might work to great effect.

Hilinski’s father’s intuition is absolutely correct; had his son’s demise been more difficult and less absolutely certain than a firearms death, things might have turned out differently.

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It looks as though no one in any way saw Hilinski’s appalling act coming. His suicide note, which will not be released, apparently revealed little or nothing of his motive (UD‘s going to guess that this means its content was pretty short and simple: Goodbye. Sorry.). FWIW, here’s a possible scenario.

Always very strong and healthy, he had begun to experience troubling symptoms: Some mental confusion, maybe some occasional trembling in his hands. Given his lifelong intense devotion to football, this would have panicked and horrified him and made him wonder about his future in the sport, not to mention the future of his general health.

Further, plenty of people who knew him have commented that he exhibited the macho stoicism typical of football guys: If you’re suffering, you don’t tell anyone.

Throwing a convenient big ol’ killing machine into that mix is just asking for it.