Sorry, Betsy DeVos: Guns Aren't a Bear Necessity in Schools
Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education is right that that animals sometimes menace schools, but her solution doesn’t seem to fit the problem.
The confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees have had plenty of wild moments, but none seems to have captured the imagination of so many people as much as Betsy DeVos’s explanation for why it might be wise to allow guns in schools.
DeVos, Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, fielded a question from Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, an outspoken advocate for gun control, on the matter of gun-free school zones. She responded by citing an example she’d heard from Senator Mike Enzi about a school in Wapiti, Wyoming, Enzi’s home state, that had a fence to keep grizzly bears out.
“I think probably there, I would imagine that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies,” DeVos said. Thus was whelped a sleuth of bear jokes at DeVos’ expense.
But it turns out the bear-baiting was misplaced, or at least badly exaggerated. The backlash is perhaps unsurprising: From the Mama Grizzly to Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s divergent approaches to the Russian bear, Washington has become a den of polarized opinions. Yet encounters with bears at schools across the country turn out to be a somewhat common occurrence—and as bear populations bounce back, particularly in the east, more schools are joining the cub, so to speak.Sorry, Betsy DeVos: Guns Aren't a Bear Necessity in Schools - The Atlantic:
