Madam Speaker, the member has asked an excellent question. It strikes at the very heart of what the government tries to do.
The government has tried to spin this out as a public safety measure, that somehow the gun registry is equivalent to gun control. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact the statistics to which the member refers are precisely that the RCMP had investigated over 88,000 actual violent crimes, as an example. That was back in 1993, I believe. Of the 88,000-plus violent crimes investigated, only 73 involved the use of a firearm. If we put that in percentage terms, .08% of violent crimes involved a firearm. It begs this question. What good would a registry even do to prevent that .08%? It would do nothing.
The government continues to give Canadians the impression that this is somehow a public safety method of reducing violent crime. We could take the $1 billion, or $2 billion or $3 billion that will be spent soon on this and actually target it toward the root causes of violent crimes in our society. We ignore the other 99.92% of violent crimes and we zero in on that .08%. Even the registry would not have effect on that.
The point the hon. member should be making is that this really will not do anything to improve public safety. It is a waste of a billion dollars. We would better off to put more police on the street to go after the violent criminal.