I would say that, certainly, there is clear and firm scientific evidence, and not from journals reviewed by law students but from real peer-reviewed journals which suggest that the presence of a gun in a home is associated with an increased risk of both suicide and intimate partner violence.
I, too, have attended far more than my share of deaths by firearm-related suicide. They're not pretty, and it would be sometimes nice, I think, to show pictures of these scenes so that.... This kind of legalese that we get into really doesn't portray the actual picture. There is no doubt there are multiple methods of potential suicide uses that could be tried, but there is equally no doubt that if you put a gun to your head and pull the trigger, you're not surviving.
The purpose of our being here today is to say suicide is a substantial risk in Canada. It's a substantial public health problem, and guns certainly increase the lethality of that suicide attempt. Some would argue, falsely, that if you aren't successful with one method, then you might go to another. That really hasn't been borne out in the literature. Suicide is, by its very definition, an impulsive act, often decided within minutes of actually pulling the trigger. We're not talking about restricting firearms in the home. Let's not get this confused. What we are talking about is that if somebody is identified as being potentially at risk for suicide then that gun, temporarily, at least, is removed from the home.