The devil went down to Vegas and shot 500 people last week. Such, at any rate, was the moral of Stephen Paddock’s rampage for Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, in a recent interview with CBS News: “I do not think that the United States Congress can legislate away evil.” Rodrigo Meirelles, the president of Hampel’s Gun Company, agreed. “You cannot legislate evil, you cannot legislate stupid,” he pontificated to Fox 32. The Las Vegas massacre “was the pure act of evil,” GOP Congressman David Young of Iowa said on Wednesday. “And, you know, as much as we’d all like to, I don’t think the U.S. Congress—we don’t know how to legislate away evil. Just like I don’t think the U.S. Congress or anyone else knows how to legislate sanity.” Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, also a Republican, tweeted out the same talking point, albeit in an elevated tone of dudgeon: “To all those political opportunists who are seizing on the tragedy in Las Vegas to call for more gun regs...You can’t regulate evil...”

In the mouths of Republicans and gun manufacturers, “evil” is a cynically evasive buzzword, highlighting the collective will of our conservative power elite to do nothing in the face of reprehensible mass slaughter. But the rhetoric of evil is more than a dodge; it’s also a tell. This is anti-democratic rhetoric: When conservatives frame gun violence in terms of spiritual warfare, pitting humans against supernatural powers and principalities, they suggest that there are only spiritual solutions to the problem and that legislative reforms are useless. “Against evil in its purity, what can mere humans accomplish? Politicians plead weakness and join the feeble citizenry in the only thing we humans can do: pray,” Patrick Blanchfield recently explained in n+1.

What good, in other words, are mere American laws against the works of Satan? But the trespasses involved in the Vegas massacre have far less to do with the lurid imagery of the Book of Revelation than with the workaday modern face of evil. Satan could have magicked all the guns on Earth to fire at once, but this was not what Paddock did. We can meet the GOP’s army of righteous instant theologians halfway and say that maybe the devil somehow set Paddock’s rampage off. But even so, Paddock profiles as an all-too familiar figure on the Trumpian American scene: an angry man with too much money, a gambling problem, and a penchant for screaming at his girlfriend in public. It’s true that the law could not have made him decent, or mitigated his anger. But it could have made it more difficult for him to murder 58 people from the windows of his hotel suite. Paddock had easy work for human reasons. Shooters do not conjure guns; they buy them.

The conservative fixation on evil, with sin as the subtext, is a symptom not only of religious hypocrisy but also of more secularized corruption. The gun lobby has invested decades of time and millions of dollars into purchasing political representation, which means it has purchased a kind of citizenship too; Mammon has shifted the balance of political power, away from the parents of Sandy Hook and toward Remington Outdoor. So Republicans flatten gun violence into a morality play, one that transforms perpetrator and victim into caricatures. If there is “evil” to be defined, identify it here, in this dehumanization.

Political rhetoric is never empty noise. Even at its most superficial level, it drives real action or inaction, and real consequences may be pinned to it. If mass shootings are binary events pitting good against evil, we must nominate monsters, and conservatives typically draw candidates from the ranks of the marginalized. Young’s pairing—we cannot legislate evil, we cannot legislate insanity—reinforces an old and troubled association of evil with mental illness.