Cape Town — Tens of thousands of people who stand to be criminalised by the Firearms Control Act will soon get another chance to put themselves in step with the law through a second gun amnesty. But they will not be able to do it anonymously.

The police plan will allow gun owners who failed to reapply for their licences by this year's March deadline a further three-month window. This could ease the administrative burden for police as many gun owners had not re-applied the first time around.

Parliament's police committee was yesterday asked by Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa to endorse the plan for another firearms amnesty between January 11 and April 11 next year.

Central to the amnesty proposal was that anyone in possession of an illegal firearm could hand it in at a police station anonymously.

But MPs of all parties wanted to know what would happen to the firearms. When told that they would be ballistically tested to see if they had been used in a crime, they wanted to know how the individual would be traced if it had been surrendered anonymously.

The committee found favour with the idea of another amnesty after the successful one in 2005. They had been told that of the weapons surrendered in the first amnesty, about 33000 were illegal and about 46000 legal.

Central firearms registry head Jaco Botma said one problem the amnesty sought to rectify was of weapons that had been inherited and not relicensed. There were 200000 dead people who were still registered gun owners.

African National Congress MP Annelize van Wyk led the charge against allowing the anonymous surrender of firearms. She said if a crime had been committed with a gun it was vital that it could be traced to the individual who surrendered it.