Nobody doubts that Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old man responsible for killing 17 people in Parkland, Florida, on Wednesday, is troubled. The troubles are obvious now, the troubles are chyrons on the television, and experts are busy exploring the ruins those troubles have created. Every time someone troubled picks up a gun and murders mass numbers of people, we ask ourselves why it happened as if the answers will ever materialize.

We’re doing it again now, along with another near-ritualized display: Every time a mass shooting occurs, conservatives go on TV to offer thoughts and prayers and to suggest—politely—that you just can’t fix crazy. “This horror shouldn’t exist, and we don’t know right now exactly why this deranged individual did this,” Ted Cruz intoned on Fox News. Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to “study” the role of mental health in school shootings; Florida Governor Rick Scott similarly wants to “work on how they can make sure people with mental illness aren’t able to get guns.” President Trump, meanwhile, suggested profiling. “So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!” he tweeted. For good measure, during a televised statement on Thursday, he also agreed that officials must “tackle the difficult issue of mental health.”

Here is what we know about Nikolas Cruz. He reportedly abused a girlfriend and killed small animals. He published racist posts on social media and posed often with guns. He had recently been orphaned. Several classmates have described him as “off” and “weird.” Of all these traits, two fit most neatly into the profile of the average mass shooter: violence against women and an obsession with guns. Cruz is also said to have had “flashes of rage.” And certainly mass shooters are angry, but a person can be angry, even violently angry, without meeting any diagnostic criteria for mental illness. White supremacy, for what it’s worth, is also not a label in the DSM-V.

And yet the right-wing suggests that mental health is clearly the culprit. Never mind that in reality, mental illness is rarely violent in an external sense. It tends to direct violence toward the self: Research suggests that people with mental illness are more likely to commit suicide rather than they are to kill others if they have access to firearms. They are 16 times more likely to be killed by police even though a 2014 study by the American Psychological Association found that only 7.5 percent of all violent crime could be linked to perpetrators’ symptoms of mental illness.

If we must rank human threats to American security, the NRA’s activist network comes far above even the seriously mentally ill.

There is really only one way to effectively reduce gun violence, and that is to reduce the number of gun owners. But the only reductions that interest Trump and his party are reductions to the very social safety net that ensures access to affordable mental health care to begin with. For people with mental illness, conservative policies and rhetoric represent an existential threat: The GOP’s war on welfare and Medicaid could make it dramatically harder for people to access care, and Republicans have proposed expansive waivers for essential health benefits that would also impact mental health parity in private insurance.