What I would like to see is a debate about how we should use limited resources to deal with crime. The problem with firearms is not a problem we're having only in Canada. It's a problem that's occurring in other places. What we really need to do about firearms—and obviously I'm not saying anything very important—is to stop people from having them and stop people from carrying them.
What we're really talking about, even if we move to a deterrence model, is looking for ways to apprehend people who have them or keep people from having them. That has to do with catching people, and catching people is unfortunately a lot harder than simply changing laws and fiddling with penalties.
I would say to move away from the penalty structure, because we have plenty of harsh laws that deal with serious crimes having to do with firearms. After all, if it's a prohibited or restricted weapon, what we're talking about at most on a first offence is moving it from four years to five years. I don't think we know many people who would commit an offence for four years but not for five years. It's a silly argument.
What we have to do is think of it in terms of the suppression of firearms, but let's also look at what it is that makes people carry firearms. One of the difficulties—and there is certainly some evidence of this—is that people carry weapons in part because they are frightened of other people carrying weapons. What we have to do is address our communities and address these things. These are much harder. It is a much harder task to do. It's not an area that I would consider to be part of my expertise, but in reading the gang literature from places like Los Angeles, which has very serious gang problems, when the experts there are worried about the narrow approaches we use, all I can say is that their narrow approaches look very much like the narrow approaches we're using.
We have to approach these in a broader fashion. We're not going to solve the problem of gun crime by passing a simple law like Bill C-10. I would say that if this committee wanted to look into this issue about how best to use resources, that would be a very good program for the committee to take on.