Public Safety committee  You notice they did not say that the firearms were involved in the homicide.... Many houses outside of urban areas have firearms in them. If the person committed suicide with a rope, a knife, gas, whatever, the fact that there is a firearm in the house is as instructive as if there is a washing machine.

Public Safety committee  Suicide researchers around the world dispute the argument that firearms are linked to suicide, that firearms ownership or access is associated with suicide rates. As you know, we have a serious social problem in Canada with aboriginal communities. They prefer hanging to shooting, and gun control is least effective on native reserves.

Public Safety committee  Do I believe in minimum sentencing...? I think Canada would be safer if we put serious and repeat offenders in jail for a longer period of time. That also gives them access to rehabilitative programs, so yes, I support--

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  Yes. Thank you very much for your question. First of all, it is arguable that if gun control is effective in any sense, the only way it can be effective is by limiting access to firearms. That is a very different approach. In the United States, they also have gun control, but it is not designed to limit the access to firearms.

Public Safety committee  A number of your facts are incorrect. First of all—

Public Safety committee  —I do not represent any organization. I am not a member of the National Firearms Association. I do not represent any firearms organization. I am here as an individual criminologist because I am in two departments at Simon Fraser: the department of criminology, as well as the faculty of business.

Public Safety committee  Apology accepted.

Public Safety committee  Yes, I have. It's very sad. I was told by an instructor at the Ontario Police College that he is frequently confronted by young aspiring police trainees who believe and place their trust in the long-gun registry. They believe what they see on the computer. In one case, Constable Valérie Gignac, a constable in Laval, Quebec, checked the registry on December 14, 2005, before she confronted a trouble call.

Public Safety committee  That's correct. I'm only looking at the long-gun registry. As you can see in the brief and the presentation, my efforts have been to focus on the statistics about long guns that were held by licensed people and that were registered. For example, only 1% of all homicides involved registered long guns.

Public Safety committee  My research presented today is merely on the long-gun registry and homicide. I did not look at suicide. If you look at suicide, you can see that suicide rates have been declining for a long time, and that while the use of firearms in suicide--by long gun or handgun--has declined and started declining way before Bill C-68 was introduced or implemented, hanging has increased.

Public Safety committee  I would like to point out that I've looked at one of the articles that Professor Blais has published, and I believe it's the one he's using to base his claims on. There were serious methodological errors defining the independent variable, the covariate included, and a lack of trend lines, and this invalidates, I think, his claims.

Public Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, members of the committee, and fellow panellists. I appreciate this opportunity to appear before you. I am Gary Mauser, professor emeritus, SFU. I am here as an individual criminologist to present facts, not myths. I will use my time to highlight a few issues referred to in the longer written brief that I have provided to the clerk.