New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton didn’t turn America’s gun control debate earlier this week when he told USA Today: “I hate guns.” No single comment, no single shooting is going to push a country to remove guns from city streets. The battle is far bigger than a Super Bowl winning football coach.

But Payton’s words mattered. They rang clear and strong and powerful just two days after a beloved former Saints player Will Smith was murdered in New Orleans. They gave the movement to end gun violence a new face and a different voice. Payton is not an activist. He has never seemed political. In his 10 seasons coaching the Saints he has come off as just another overly intense, single-minded football coach too consumed with gameplans to give much thought to the world around him.

When he speaks he is often curt. His voice is often blunt, stripped of any emotion. He’s the kind of guy people like to call “no-nonsense.” He does not apologize. In attacking a gun culture he kept calling “madness,” he sliced through the decades of rhetoric and empty notions and delivered a cold message that might have more value than even he could have expected.

And when he was asked if he worried about alienating fans in Louisiana, where, for many, guns are a way of life, he said: “I don’t care.”

Which might have been his most powerful statement of all.

“That’s the kind of leadership we need in this country on this issue,” said Ladd Everitt, the director of communication for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “America is used to seeing such cowardice from leaders on gun issues. When they see a leader who speaking the way Payton did – that to me is important. And the fact he was willing to say I don’t care what they think in Louisiana. That’s huge.”

Nothing squelches activism quite like fear. Professional athletes fear speaking out on social issues. They fear taking unpopular stances that could cost them endorsement deals. They fear angering their coaches who want them focused on games and team owners who hate controversy. Fear grips coaches even more. Head coaching jobs are hard to get and even harder to keep. Most men who coach professional sports teams live in perpetual terror of losing their jobs. Wading into loaded issues like gun control is unthinkable to them.

Payton showed no fear in attacking guns in a pro-gun state. Few NFL coaches have as much to lose as he does in Louisiana where his popularity is immense. Most in his position would gently back down or soften their words. Instead, he called the current gun culture “silliness,” wondered openly why anyone would truly need a gun, and defiantly defended his position.

“Do you know how many gun nuts are flooding his email?” Everitt said. “I will bet anything that he is being flooded by emails from gun nuts right now. He’s going to get death threats. But he didn’t care and that’s going to matter. Someone else is going to say: hell, if Payton says this than maybe it makes sense.”

Part of what makes Payton’s voice so strong is that his words are not political. He can’t be dismissed as a Democrat warbling on about cherished causes. He told USA Today that he is “not a liberal” and probably identifies more with the right than the left. He spoke not as someone with polished talking points, but as a man who lives near New Orleans, sees the senseless violence, and is still processing how Smith could be shot seven times in the back over a fender bender.

“I think what this says is you can be conservative and have certain values, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing for civilians to carry guns,” said Robert Spitzer, the chair of the political science department at the State University of New York, Cortland, who has written extensively on gun issues. “In the long-term [the Smith killing] fades into the background quickly, but it is a moment where you have someone in the community, who is a conservative, saying that carrying a gun is not the right thing. I think it’s a voice that makes a difference.”

Spitzer points out that Smith the suspect – a former high school star football player named Cardell Hayes – were both carrying guns on the night Smith was killed. He said studies show that more than half of professional athletes have guns, often because they need protection. It was this very argument, that guns somehow keep people safe, that gun control advocates fight the most.

Their words often fall empty in a country where many insist they need guns to keep themselves safe. The fact Will Smith had a gun in his car and is now dead doesn’t shift the debate. But having Sean Payton saying much the same thing in a clipped, angry voice gives the anti-gun violence movement something it needs: a commonsense football coach wondering aloud why anyone needs guns.

“Tone matters,” Everitt said. “The fact he did speak in such a forceful and fearless tone is going to be incredibly important. Somebody in a red state somewhere is going to be sitting will hear what he said and say to themselves: ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’”

More than three years ago, NBC’s Bob Costas criticized a “gun culture” on a Sunday Night Football telecast after the Kansas City Chiefs’ Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend and later himself. It was, Everitt said an enormous moment. There was the host of the NFL’s signature show saying things so few in professional football dared to say themselves.

“It paved the way for more guys,” Everitt said. “For those of us in the movement that was powerful.”

Now after another football shooting, an even unlikelier voice said even stronger things. Sean Payton’s words this week won’t lead to new gun control laws. He won’t change many positions. But in the greater fight to get guns off the streets he is a significant piece in an argument that says: enough.