If indeed the store owners would be required to keep this data, essentially all we're doing is decentralizing the gun registry away from the government, which has privacy controls and so on, and into the hands of store owners.
I would like to ask you a question, Mr. Weltz.
For both Mr. Kuntz and Mr. Weltz, I appreciate your first-hand experiences of these issues, and I respect them greatly. But we're in the realm of social science. Mr. Leef said that we can't establish causation 100%, but if we're in the realm of social science, we never will.
You've said that registration has not diminished drunk driving, but we actually don't know, because if people felt they could hit someone while drunk and kill them, and just leave their car in a field somewhere and it would never be traced back to them, who knows what people's attitudes might be?
The other thing you said, which I found a bit contradictory, was that of course you believe in the safe storage of weapons, but then you went on to give a hypothetical example about how if somebody really wants to seek revenge on someone, whether their weapon is stored or not, they're still going to get a hold of it.
There has been data that shows suicide rates have dropped since the gun registry was instituted. Is there any evidence to suggest the registry did not contribute to that?