Brent Key on Nashville school shooting: "Something's got to change."

Brent Key is an emotional man. We learned that on a national stage in 2019, when he left Alabama for his alma mater Georgia Tech because, in his passionate words, he had more to sell recruits in Atlanta than Tuscaloosa. 

On Wednesday, Key directed that emotion in the most heartbreaking and maddening direction in American society. 

In the wake of a shooting at Nashville's Covenant School that killed three children and three adults, Key used a portion of a regular scheduled spring media availability to use his platform as Georgia Tech's head coach to speak as a citizen of good conscience and the father of a 4-year-old girl.

"Something has to change, and I have a chance to stand up here in front of a camera, and if one person hears me say that and agrees and does something to help force a change, and something to happen, and a thousand other people say something negative about it, I don't care. 'Cause it worked. And if this one thing I say can help somebody else say something and have the guts to say something and maybe someone will have the guts to stand up and DO something, then maybe something will happen," Key said, righteous outrage written across his face.

There, Key touches on the bleakest aspect of American life today. Twenty-four years post-Columbine and a decade post-Newtown, we've become so desensitized that it takes a massacre on the scale of Uvalde to dominate the American conversation. And we've been having this same conversation so long that each person trots out the same argument they did the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that. In the meantime, children keep dying. 

"As long as people stand up there and bicker and argue, more and more kids are going to die. 'Cause it hasn't changed. So something's got to change," Key said.

"It's the most heartbreaking thing in the world to think about your daughter going to school where she's supposed to be safe and protected. It's bull----, man. It is."

Well said.