As I said at the outset, when I talk about gun violence, I use the World Health Organization's definition of gun violence, so that doesn't restrict it to urban gang violence. It includes domestic violence. It includes suicide. It includes political violence.
I think if you recognize that gun violence includes all of those things and you take a public health perspective, you have to look at root causes. For root causes of gang violence, there's lots of research that talks about the impact of disparity and lack of social capital and age and drugs and, and, and.... We know that.
We know that when it comes to suicide, there is a whole set of risk factors.
When it comes to domestic violence, there are others, as there are with political violence.
We would not say for a moment that gun control is a panacea. Those factors have to be addressed. We also know from the research—and this is pretty universal—that when you restrict the availability of the instrument, i.e., the firearm, you reduce the chances that an assault will become a homicide.
I've read from the B.C. Task Force on Illegal Firearms, which feels that controls over the sales of firearms are absolutely fundamental to stemming the flow of legal guns to illegal markets, because every illegal gun started as a legal gun either in Canada or in the United States. It would be nice if we had a wall, but we don't, so the flow of smuggled guns remains a problem.
We need to do everything that we can to prevent legal guns in Canada from being diverted. The ability to trace firearms by keeping records of sales is fundamental to reducing the flow. We also need better support for policing. We need support for victims of violence to reduce their revictimization and to break the cycle of violence.
There aren't easy solutions to complex problems like gang violence, but stricter controls over firearms are certainly an important part of them.