Story highlights Jill Filipovic: Betsy DeVos' absurd statement that schools might need guns for "potential grizzlies'"shows GOP's irrational fealty to NRA

She says that reality defeats a sane debate about gun policy -- even about guns in proximity to schoolchildren. Americans deserve better

Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and Nairobi and the author of the forthcoming book, "The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness." Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) The latest slogan from the gun lobby: "Use in case of grizzly."

Jill Filipovic

That was education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos's line at her confirmation hearing earlier this week when Sen. Chris Murphy asked her about having guns in schools -- an idea even unpopular with many gun-friendly Americans. DeVos replied that guns may be necessary in some schools, such as in a rural state like Wyoming, where they might be needed "to protect from potential grizzlies." Cue widespread Internet mockery.

What the incident showed, though, isn't that DeVos is foolish enough to actually believe there's a significant problem with aggressive grizzly bears interrupting calculus class. It's that the gun lobby's positions are so extreme, and its influence on the Republican Party s o corrosive, that even a rational, honest dialogue -- even a rational and honest-though-heated debate -- about the place of guns in society has become all but impossible. What we have left is absurdist political theater. Grizzlies.

The American gun lobby has one simple, insane position: guns are good (and perhaps necessary) virtually everywhere. This stance helps gun manufacturers sell more guns, but doesn't do much else.

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To admit before a nationally televised congressional hearing that perhaps it's not the best idea to place commercial items expressly designed to kill with stunning efficiency in the vicinity of schoolchildren would be to admit that guns are hand-held killing machines, not benign tools occasionally misused by deranged people. The latter is, after all, the position of the National Rifle Association.

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