Emma Green: You may have seen the comments a number of Republican legislators made in response to Las Vegas, arguing that “you can’t regulate evil.” What do you make of this?

Alan Wolfe: The Las Vegas killing, compared to the other things we’re seeing like hurricanes and forest fires, gets back to the most fundamental philosophical question about evil: whether there’s a natural or a human cause.

The others, clearly, are natural. You can’t really regulate them. You can’t stop the natural events that cause them. But with the Las Vegas killing, some kind of public policy could conceivably have had an effect there, because this was a human being picking up a weapon and shooting. So they’re different. I do sense that the defenders of gun ownership conflate them. They talk about the evil in Las Vegas as if it’s just another natural evil, that a crazy man just happened to buy a gun and happened to shoot these people.

Green: Are certain crimes so egregious that they pass a threshold of inexplicable, unimaginable, unpreventable evil?

Wolfe: Guns give people a feeling of power. I’m not here to psychoanalyze this guy, but that certainly seems to be the case in a lot of mass shootings. People say that these shooters are abnormal or sick or something, but I would hazard a generalization that their overwhelming feeling is powerlessness.

Now, by shooting people, they’ve taken command of that and called attention to themselves on the world stage. They die, but they die knowing that they’ll be in the newspaper the next day.

Green: To what extent is it the government’s job to “regulate evil”?

Wolfe: [Republican legislators who argue against regulating evil] don’t want a role for government in general, and so it fits naturally into their anti-government ideology not to try to regulate guns.

But the interesting question, for me, is if they’re so afraid of regulation, it conveys a hidden message that regulation actually works. Why would they fear it? They must, at some level, understand that regulation must work.

I don’t sense that right-wing politicians are afraid of regulation in all areas of life. Someone like Vice President Mike Pence is actually quite a regulator when it comes to things he considers sinful, like pornography. There’s a kind of selective regulation going on here.

Green: Do you think people with different ideological convictions might conceptualize evil differently? If so, how?

Wolfe: My perception is that in the last 20 to 25 years, we’ve undergone a radical change in how we talk about evil. I remember when former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power wrote her book about genocide and ethnic cleansing. One of the arguments in her book is that we are reluctant to use the word “evil.” She went through examples of politicians that would avoid the term as much as possible and find all kinds of synonyms for it.