If I may.
I'm sure that communities are asking for legislation to make their communities safer. It's happening all over the country. The reality is that the statistics that are available do show that crime rates are dropping and that violent crime is going down. But I'm sure that as politicians you're getting this all the time from communities, saying, please make our communities safer.
The way for us to do that is to listen to what we've been told by the professionals for so many years, that if we can create a certainty of apprehension, crime will go down. The biggest deterrent is the certainty of detection and apprehension. So when it comes to gun crimes, let's put our efforts there.
My comments--and I didn't mean to insult anybody from any province or from any native community; obviously there are contexts where Canadians do like guns, when they're in their proper context. When somebody is using a firearm for sustenance for himself and his family in a native community, nobody has a problem with that. The competitions you're talking about, nobody has a problem with them.
I think I tempered my comments with the fact that Canadians don't mind them in their proper context, a hunting rifle in hunting season on hunting territory. When I say Canadians don't like guns, I mean that in any courtroom in this country, when a bail hearing comes up and the evidence goes in before the judge and you see that somebody had a firearm, it makes everybody nervous. It makes everybody nervous. I think that's the way we are, perhaps as a people, without meaning to put down, in any way, shape or form, anyone in this country.
There will always be examples, I'm sure, of people who had a previous conviction and committed another crime, of terrible tragedies ending in death. Yes, of course, there will always be those examples. That's for sure. What we need is a plan to look at reducing gun crime across the board, if that's where the problem is, and not simply saying, well, there are going to be two or three offences for which we're going to change the burden, but in some much more serious ones, we're not going to go there. It will only create legal wrangling, which will leave out most of the Canadian population and take years to get to a settlement.
That's my fear. I may be right, I may be wrong, but that's my fear, and I'm only here to tell you my fears.