Public health researchers at the University of Otago in Wellington.

Since the 1990s, New Zealand’s firearms policy has been dominated by a gun lobby of licensed firearms owners. They worked to ensure that the opinions of non-gun owners and users – about 90 per cent of all New Zealanders – were treated as irrelevant when it came to gun policy.

Many gun users, probably most, are sensible people with a legitimate use for their firearms, but when we interviewed leaders among the firearms community in 2017-18, they told us that our gun laws were very good; some even said New Zealand had ‘‘the best firearms laws in the world’’. This is simply not correct.

We began our research two years before the Christchurch murders because we were concerned about the very high number of guns and continuing deaths and injuries from firearms. Yes, it’s true that firearm fatalities have declined steadily over recent decades, thanks to dedicated work by the firearms and hunting communities around safety, and to regulations enforcing better storage. Despite this, the gun lobby has insisted repeatedly that any additional regulation, especially a firearms register, would place an unreasonable burden upon them.

Until last week, when discussing firearms, both the gun lobby and police focused almost exclusively on criminals getting hold of guns, and on gun crime. It is important to protect the police and the population from gun crime, but the best protection will be created by exercising stronger control over fewer guns in our country.

A computerised firearms register would initially be incomplete. It is unlikely to include all the ‘‘grey’’ guns – those belonging to unlicensed people, or guns belonging to criminals. But, like the Australian state gun registers, it would improve. We are better to start now with a register that is not perfect than go on as we have since 1997, when the Thorp report recommended a register and the gun lobby ensured none eventuated.

Most firearms deaths here now are not from crime or hunting accidents but from suicides – about 50 a year, the same number as were killed last week at the Christchurch mosques. When someone attempts suicide with a gun, they usually die; there is no opportunity for second thoughts.

The same kind of effort that went into reducing hunting deaths is needed for firearms suicide prevention, and focusing on gun crime will not help solve this problem. We need a firearms policy that focuses on preventing the lethal outcomes when guns are used wrongly, and only secondarily on looking after the interests of current firearms users.