Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul will continue performing eye surgery if elected president, he told CNN on Friday.
“I jokingly said we’re going to turn the Lincoln bedroom into a surgery suite,” he told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on “New Day.”
The Kentucky senator recently came back from a mission trip to Haiti with the University of Utah, where he said the group performed 200 cataract surgeries, adding that he hopes his next mission trip will be performing surgeries on Indian reservations next year.
Paul said he still practices medicine in Kentucky for people who don’t have money or insurance.
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“You think politics could be frustrating sometimes, you’re absolutely right,” he said. “But in medicine the amazing thing is we all unify around a goal, someone is blind, we remove the cataract and they can see again. There’s probably nothing more rewarding than seeing that smile.”
The presidential candidate also shared his opinion on gun control, with the debate renewed after two journalists were killed on live television Wednesday morning.
He said that typically people who commit these violent crimes don’t “obey laws to begin with,” adding that guns aren’t the only weapons people use to kill other people.
“People kill people with a variety of different means,” he said. “I don’t think removing guns or even placing more obstacles in front of law abiding citizens works.”
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In the latest Quinnipiac survey released Thursday, Paul had 2% national support and was in 11th place out of the 17 declared Republican candidates.
He said that despite the polling, he has faith in his campaign and shared some of his presidential platform, saying that if he’s president, he will create a single tax rate for all Americans. He said he believes government should be smaller and that Americans need more “personal freedom.”
“One of the interesting things is that I hear these polls and I wonder about them the same as everybody else does but I’ve been traveling throughout the West and we get 500 to 1,000 people at every speech. Our crowds are bigger than they’ve ever been,” he said. “So if I weren’t readying any of this or seeing these polls, I would think we’re doing better than we ever have.”
