I'll try to just re-emphasize some points that I made in May or June of this year.
Rather than considering myself an expert in the field of firearms violence, which I am not, following 35 years in rural practice as both a family physician and an emergency physician, and a coroner, I feel I can bear some degree of witness to the issue of firearms accessibility and rural death.
Prior to beginning in rural practice in Perth, Ontario, just south of here, I have lived in Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver, and have served three years of active service in the Canadian military. During that time, I rarely encountered a firearm injury or death.
Having been a rural emergency physician, however, and as a coroner, I've seen more than my share of firearm injuries and death by long-gun suicide. Of the three murders during my 35-year tenure in Perth, I had been involved on two of them—I don't know why I'm the lucky soul—including the difficult experience of investigating a double murder-suicide by long gun as a consequence of intimate partner violence. That is a memory that, 25 years later, still stays with me to this day. It reminds me constantly of the need to prevent firearms access for those who shouldn't have them.
I should note that we consider, as an emergency physicians group, the issue of the public's health an entirely non-partisan issue. This may explain why I, as a rural, licensed gun-owner and a member of the Conservative Party, view the issue of prevention of firearms misuse and injury equally through a non-partisan lens. It just isn't partisan for me. I'm not an anti-gun guy.
As a member of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, this will be my fourth appearance before a committee, dating back to when Warren Allmand was a chair, in 1994. That probably makes me an old guy.