In terms of the intent, there are a couple of things. As I said in my speech, part of it is recognizing the disarming effect. When you're talking to a victim, they'll say, “I would not have been in this situation other than because of this occurrence”. If someone comes up to you and pulls a gun out, you're going to stop.
The same type of thing occurred there. That was the rationale for it, to look at it and say that people have to realize that when all of the sentencing aspect of this is done, whether we're talking about mitigating or aggravating circumstances, what caused this was not their being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but somebody actually going out there with the intent to do harm. That's really what my main focus was—awareness.
Awareness is part of it. People then would ask, “Does that mean being an aggravating circumstance will mean the general public will say that they'd better not do that, because it is in the Criminal Code?” I don't think that, and I don't believe that is what aggravating circumstances are intended to be. But it is a case of giving this tool to the courts so that they are able to take it and during the sentencing hearing say, “No, this is serious. This breach that you have here, this was the disarming factor. This was the type of thing that was done, and that is the reason you had this opportunity to do even further harm.”