Mr. Speaker, the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca reminds me that the first dead person I saw was a suicide victim with a shotgun. The technique was put the shotgun in the mouth and pull the trigger and the head was completely blown off. I was 17 at the time.
Subsequently I became a police reporter, a journalist, and I saw a lot of murders and suicides in the course of that part of my career. One of the things I learned about suicides is that there are two things that often operate. One is that the suicides generally do not want to hurt themselves. They do not like to use knives and other methods that actually may do them injury or may lead to a fairly slow death. What they prefer is something that is instantaneous and something also that will answer their impulses.
Often suicides are not planned over a long period. If they get very depressed suddenly they will try to take their own lives. In the presence of a firearm in a household where there is a person who is known to be subject to these violent depressions who might be a potential suicide, registration would be very important in this instance. I would have thought that the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, in the light of his profession, would appreciate that. I was very surprised that he said the opposite because gun registration surely would save the lives of some suicides.