New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton has said “our city is broken” and pleaded for an end to gun violence after the former Saints defensive end Will Smith was shot dead in a road-rage incident on Saturday night.

Smith, 34, a Super Bowl winner in 2009, was killed Saturday after being involved in an altercation following a minor traffic accident in the city’s Lower Garden District. Police have arrested Cardell Hayes, 28, and charged him with second-degree murder.

“I’ve heard people argue that everybody needs a gun,” Payton said in an interview with USA Today. “That’s madness. I know there are many kids who grow up in a hunting environment. I get that. But there are places, like England, where even the cops don’t have guns.”

Police said Smith and Hayes got into an argument after Smith’s Mercedes was rear-ended by Hayes’ Hummer. According to police, Hayes shot Smith and his wife, Racquel, who was taken to a hospital with a leg wound.

Payton, who coached Smith between 2006 and 2013, went to the scene of the shooting early Saturday morning and joined Smith’s family at the hospital.

“Two hundred years from now, they’re going to look back and say, ‘What was that madness about?’” Payton said. “The idea that we need [guns] to fend off intruders … people are more apt to draw them [in other situations]. That’s some silly stuff we’re hanging on to.”

“I’m not an extreme liberal,” Payton said. “I find myself leaning to the right on some issues. But on this issue, I can’t wrap my brain around it.

“I hate guns,” he said. “If this opinion in Louisiana is super unpopular, so be it. Our city is broken.”

Payton’s comments were echoed by star quarterback Drew Brees and the New Orleans Pelicans coach Alvin Gentry. Gentry called on officials “to eliminate such senseless violence in our city” and said “the whole gun thing makes me sick to my stomach.”

“I don’t want to have what happened the other night, in the Will Smith situation, taint everything about this city,” Gentry said before the Pelicans’ game against the Bulls at the New Orleans Arena on Monday night. “It was a senseless thing. It was ridiculous. The whole gun thing makes me sick to my stomach.”

Brees told local station WWL Radio: “This is a problem that’s been around for a long time. And it’s not just New Orleans, it’s nationwide. It’s worldwide. It’s the way that people treat people. And somehow along the way we’ve all become desensitized to the fact that this stuff happens every day and it’s OK, or we can just kind of move on from it as if it’s gonna happen and it’s part of the way things are and there’s nothing we can really do about it.

“It’s overwhelming,” Brees added. “It’s overwhelming when you think about this epidemic, or this problem, of young, mainly young men, killing young men for no apparent reason.”

Payton has been with the Saints for 10 years, and has lived in several different neighborhoods in New Orleans. He landed the Saints job in 2006, when the city was rebuilding after the devastation of Katrina, but he said the violence is as bad as it has been in his time as a resident.

“It’s like our big little secret,” Payton said. “They don’t want to kill tourism. But right now, it’s like the wild, wild west here.”