U.S. Rep. Brett Guthrie on Thursday made a stop in Owensboro to support three individuals inducted into the local Business Hall of Fame. Before the event, he did a short Q&A with Owensboro Times regarding his thoughts on gun control, the indictment of former President Donald Trump, and whether TikTok should be banned.
Here’s what he had to say:
Owensboro Times: Would you like to start by saying why you came to the Owensboro Business Hall of Fame luncheon hosted by Junior Achievement of West Kentucky?
Brett Guthrie: It’s great to be here. Junior Achievement is so important. It really teaches people how to understand our economy and how people can invent things and become entrepreneurial. … It’s entrepreneurship in the market economy that changes America and changes the world, and I’m here to promote that.
OT: Speaking of the economy, as a member of Congress what are some of the big topics you’re concerned about right now?
BG: There’s a lot of things going on in the world, obviously foreign affairs, what’s happening with China, and our lack of, it seems, ability to have any diplomatic success with China. I know (China President Xi Jinping) is a difficult person to deal with, (Russia President Vladmir Putin) is a difficult person to deal with. … There’s just a lot of things that we’re failing on. The Executive Branch does the foreign policy according to the Constitution, and we’re going to try to get back into (the oversight committee) and try to figure out what they’re doing and the lack of decisions they’re making.
The other thing is energy prices because of what’s going on in Saudi Arabia. They’re decreasing their output. Price of gas is back up again. I paid $3.49 for it two days ago, and it should be $2.25 if we produce American oil and gas. Right before we adjourned to be home for this Easter work period, we passed House Representative Bill 1, and that bill is to get back to American energy independence.
OT: The idea of gun control is a big topic right now (due to recent shootings and threats). How do you feel about this issue?
BG: My view of it is, these guns aren’t killing people. It’s the person using the guns that kill people. You see in other countries where they have (more gun restrictions), they are still using guns but also using other ways to mass murder and kill people. It’s concerning. We just need to figure out how to keep the wrong people from having those. One is you need to put people in prison for violating gun laws that we have on the books. That’s the first thing I would want to see, is that we truly enforce the gun laws we have on the books and we put people in jail that aren’t supposed to have guns.
OT: What are your thoughts on the Trump indictment?
BG: I think that indictment was purely political. I don’t think any reasonable person can look at that and say it wasn’t political. You have a District Attorney (Alvin Bragg) in New York who doesn’t indict people of committing violent crime go after President Trump, saying in his campaign he was gonna go after President Trump. (Bragg) has a misdemeanor that he says is a felony under New York law … but he says ‘I don’t have to disclose what that law is.’ So if you’re going to indict a former president, (if) you’re going to indict the leader of the opposition right now — if you look at the polling he’s the leader of the opposition of the other party — you need to do more than say, ‘I have a reason but I’m not going tell you because the law doesn’t require me to.’ That’s just wrong. I think most people see it as wrong. I think President Trump will be exonerated in this.
OT: There was a Congressional hearing about Tik Tok recently. Where do you stand on any sort of regulation or ban regarding the app?
BG: I was actually part of that hearing. My question was, and it’s other social media apps too … people can buy drugs on those apps now. There’s a code way to do it. You can get on there, they give you a ‘short,’ you get a code, and you go to another site. My question to (TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew) was, ‘Well you can’t do it in China so you obviously have the technology to prevent this. You’re preventing it in China, but you’re not doing it here.’ It’s really concerning where that data flows. … We don’t want the Communist Party of China having all this information.
The question is how do you (ban the app) without infringing on people’s First Amendment rights? And that’s what we have to figure out and we have to balance. People first and foremost need to be made aware if you’re using Tik Tok, the Communist Party of China has your information. We absolutely need to ban it through all government computers and technology, which we’ve done in the House of Representatives. The question on the overall ban is how do we do it? That’s what we were trying to figure out. How do you do it without it just popping up somewhere else under a different name in a different way? That’s difficult to do sometimes.
