Brazil's Congress on Tuesday approved stricter gun controls in a nation said to have the world's highest number of murders.

The nation's Senate passed a bill which allows President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to sign into law some of the strictest gun laws in Latin America, after a six-year fight over the legislation.

"The country is going to start to have efficient gun controls, something it's not had up to today," Antonio Rangel of Rio de Janeiro anti-violence group Viva Rio told reporters in Congress.

Most Brazilians know someone who has been affected by violence.

About 45,000 Brazilians are murdered each year, or one person every 12 minutes, giving it the largest number of annual homicides of any country, according to the World Health Organization.

Some 40,000 of those deaths are from firearms, most of them unregistered and illegal handguns.

Those killed are usually young and poor. Many are from shantytowns in big cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

The disarmament statute aims to control the flow of legal arms into the swelling arms black market, now thought to contain up to 20 million handguns.

The statute makes it illegal for ordinary Brazilians to own guns and imposes tough prison sentences on people found carrying them illegally .

It calls for background checks for gun purchases and raises the legal age for gun ownership to 25 from 21.

The Federal Police are going to take over registration of guns from state authorities and create a national firearm registry.

Gun owners would have 180 days after the law is passed to register them or hand them in to the police. After that time, anyone found with an unregistered gun faces up to four years in prison.

It also calls for a national referendum in October 2005 which will ask: "Should the sale of arms and munitions be prohibited in Brazil?."

The new law comes after 70 gun control proposals sat in Congress for years, facing opposition from a gun lobby backed by Brazil's arms industry which is the world's sixth largest.

It took waves of slaughter between Rio de Janeiro drug gangs, thousands of police killings of civilians and the annual deaths of over a hundred police officers in Sao Paulo to push legislators into action.

The new law prohibits the sale and use of guns by anyone except the military, security and police officials, target shooters and transport companies.

At present, all that is required to buy a handgun in Brazil is proof of identity, a utility bill and a payslip. It only takes a couple of phone calls in cities around the nation's capital Brasilia to pick up the kind of unregistered, 200 reais ($70) handgun used in 95 percent of armed crimes.

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