Condoleezza Rice is shooting down calls for armed teachers in America's classrooms.
"I don't really like the idea, frankly, of a gun in my classroom. I think that we need to have law enforcement protect us," the former U.S. secretary of state and influential Republican told radio host Hugh Hewitt when asked what she thought of President Donald Trump's call for educators to pack heat.
"If people need to train people to protect our schools, and perhaps even communities want to consider whether or not they need guards to protect the schools, it's a sad thing to think that we might, then that's something that we should look at.
"But I don't think that just arming people in the classroom is going to be the answer."
Rice, who served in the George W. Bush administration and now teaches political science at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, said it is time Americans questioned about "what the right to bear arms means in the modern world."
"I don't understand why civilians need to have access to military weapons. We wouldn't, we wouldn't say you can go out and buy a tank," Rice told Hewitt.
"So I do think we need to have that conversation. But I believe that the rights that we have in the Constitution are indivisible. We can't throw away the Second Amendment and keep the First."
Rice's comments came nine days after a 19-year-old gunman entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and shot dead 14 children and three adults.
She said she believes law enforcement officials "have to get better at intelligence when it is a domestic issue."
"Clearly, with this young man, there were all kinds of signs and signals, and all kinds of information that he was a problem," said Rice, 63.
"And so we think about intelligence as a function that we do abroad. We need to have intelligence on terrorists. Well, I understand privacy concerns. I understand the First Amendment concerns. But you know, when you have a dangerous person that's known to law enforcement, you really have to act."
Rice, a Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, is the author of "Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom," published by Twelve; and "No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington," published by Crown.
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