Was his doctor (who he shot to death along with most of the doctor’s family) treating him for mental disorders related to the concussions? Was he obviously mentally ill? If so, how did he get the gun? Do they sell guns to mentally ill people in South Carolina?
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There are (according to one source) 21 guns for every individual in South Carolina. Adams had his pick.
His proud alma mater, South Carolina State, hasn’t yet taken down his hero page.
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‘I can say he’s a good kid,’ [Adams’ father said]. ‘I think the football messed him up.’ Football and an entire state sagging under the weight of its weaponry. Football and weaponry and mental illness and I’ll bet Adams was transmitting for some time to a number of people that he was messed up. Nothing like 21 guns per person for the deeply paranoid. Even if people tried keeping him away from guns, in South Carolina that would have been impossible.
I wonder if he issued threats. All of this will come out, and we’ll all read about it, because in a country where heavily armed uninteresting madmen kill dozens of people every week, this killing titillates: a rich prominent doctor; a high body count including children; an NFL football player. South Carolina: Ground zero for Strange brew, see what’s inside of you: Guns, god, football.
And what drugs – prescription, non-prescription – was the shooter on? All of this will come out.
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And as to the shock the local police chief is expressing – “This doesn’t happen here.” – weawy? Depends on what you mean by “here,” don’t it? Here as in the teeny tiny town where it happened, or here as in all over South Carolina, one of the ten most dangerous states in the country.
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His sister confirms that he had been for some time “aggressively” unbalanced. Yet another instance of the truth Nathan Heller not long ago uttered: Going berserk with guns has become a way of American life.
April 10th, 2021 at 2:22PM
I know this is a little pedantic but there are not 21 guns for every person in South Carolina. There are in America about 40 million more guns than people i.e. on an average 1.25 guns per person. It is highly unlikely that South Carolina has gun ownership 16 times the national average. I have not tracked down a plausible number, but I am pretty sure it isn’t 21 per person. BTW I support a total ban on hand guns and a very strict control of rifles for hunting cf. the law in the UK.
April 10th, 2021 at 3:00PM
Hi Bruce: The latest info I can find says that there are 1,073,743 registered and 392,273,257 unregistered guns in the States; SC has no registering requirement. Add in that it’s in the top ten of the most armed states in the nation and you might not get 21 (I do link to a source for that number, but don’t know how reliable the source is), but you probably get pretty close. Of course the problem w/ no real laws concerning guns is that we cannot know with any degree of certainty how many guns there are in SC. So I guess I should have added that uncertainty to the post.
As more info about the shooter has come out, it’s clear he was “aggressive” (his sister’s word) and mentally ill for some time, and several people knew it. Why did he have guns?
November 15th, 2022 at 9:51AM
[…] sister of Phillip Adams knew he was, in her words, “aggressively” mentally ill – paranoid. He also had shitloads of […]
December 20th, 2022 at 5:11AM
[…] which routinely keep their sports hero bio pages up even when the hero is, for instance, a mass murderer, fancy schmancy schools like Yale erase the bio pages of criminals, frauds, plagiarists, and other […]