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Controversial Gun Store : Boulevard Auto--Where Compton Goes for Arms

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Times Staff Writer

Danlo Duran fell in love with the AK-47 assault rifle on New Year’s Eve, when he borrowed a buddy’s and fired off bullet after bullet in celebration of 1989. What a perfect gift for dad, Duran thought, as he blazed away at midnight.

Duran found his father’s present this week at Boulevard Auto, a gun shop in Compton, where he paid $351 and walked out with a new AK-47, with bayonet.

His purchase Wednesday came only one day after the Compton City Council unanimously approved an ordinance--to take effect in 30 days--that would prohibit the sale or possession of AK-47s and other semiautomatic rifles.

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“It was time,” said Councilman Maxcy D. Filer, who wrote the ordinance, “for somebody to take the first step. What we’re trying to do is get guns off the streets and out of the hands of criminals. Nobody in my estimation should have a gun.”

Such efforts are nothing new in Compton, where council members in 1987 passed, and then rescinded, a ban on all handguns in their crime-ridden city. But after a schoolyard massacre in Stockton last week, in which a drifter with a Chinese-made AK-47 murdered five children, Compton has found itself at the fore of a growing national debate over semiautomatic weapons.

As members of Congress and California’s lawmakers ponder proposed legislation on the issue, the Compton council enacted its own ban Tuesday night, even though the city attorney conceded that the law probably would not survive a constitutional challenge.

A National Rifle Assn. spokesman in Washington said there is “no question” that the NRA will take up that challenge in coming weeks.

The controversy is hardly academic at the Boulevard Auto gun shop, where owner Mike Virgilio sells 10 to 15 military-type assault rifles each week.

Some people in Compton have cast the shop on Long Beach Boulevard as the house of the devil and the bearded Virgilio as Satan himself. The shop gained notoriety last year when the Rev. Jesse Jackson villified it during his presidential campaign speeches as a ready provider of deadly weapons.

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“We’re not picking on the guy,” said Mayor Walter Tucker, a dentist, “but if we had our way, he’d be selling auto parts or something else that doesn’t hurt people.”

Defends His Position

Virgilio, 41, says he is simply trying to make a living and abide by the law as it stands.

He is a burly, affable man who knows first-hand the efficiency of that which he sells. Twenty years ago, Virgilio said, a burglar shot off his lower right leg, leaving him a life on crutches.

“We have a very good, progressive Police Department in this town, but they are so overworked that they can’t be everywhere all the time, protecting everybody,” Virgilio said. “There is a real need, a right, for people to protect themselves and now the City Council wants to take that right away. It’s insulting to the citizens. It’s like being in South Africa.”

Being in Boulevard Auto--Virgilio used to sell auto parts but does so now only as a sideline--is like being in a vault. The walls and ceiling are lined with blackened sheets of reinforced steel to prevent break-ins. To come and go, one must be “buzzed” through steel security doors with electric locks. Virgilio keeps a 9-millimeter Walther pistol under his shirttail; his clerks also are armed.

Virgilio believes the precautions are warranted. After all, he reasons, the 96,000 residents of Compton, located midway between downtown Los Angeles and Los Angeles Harbor, endure one of the highest crime rates around.

The city recorded 80 killings in 1987, one for every 1,200 residents, according to FBI statistics. That was nearly twice the murder rate in Lynwood, Compton’s neighbor to the north; more than three times the murder rate in Paramount to the east; eight times the rate at which people were slain in Carson to the south and 14 times the rate of violent death in Gardena to the west. Gangs are blamed.

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Still, some of Virgilio’s detractors contend that the guns offered at Boulevard Auto may be contributing directly to the bloodshed, a charge that Virgilio dismisses. Nearly half of his sales, he points out, are “to law enforcement.”

As he spoke, three Compton police officers walked in, ogling and hefting the rifles, shotguns, revolvers, pistols and other weapons that line Virgilio’s walls and shelves. While perusing Virgilio’s wares, they defended him as a prudent, respected businessman and questioned the City Council’s ordinance.

“It’s not a bad decision--it shows good faith--but I don’t think it’s going to have an impact,” said Sgt. Walter Nelson. “I don’t think that people will be giving up their semiautomatic guns--they have too much investment. And if they can’t buy them here, they’ll just buy them somewhere else.”

Unlike a fully automatic machine gun, which is generally outlawed because it continues to fire as long as the trigger is depressed, the semiautomatic fires one bullet for each squeeze of the trigger. Still, critics contend that semiautomatics, particularly assault weapons like the AK-47, remain far more deadly than other, less-advanced firearms, which must be reloaded or re-cocked with each shot.

Much of Virgilio’s business is in semiautomatic firearms--the AK-47s he sells range from $300 to $3,000--but it’s not as if everyone who walks into Boulevard Auto leaves with one, he said. By law, Virgilio could sell assault rifles to 18-year-olds, but sells only to customers over the age of 21, he said.

Virgilio said he has taken other steps to be a conscientious merchant. When Compton officials complained that the camouflage paint job covering his storefront was not in keeping with their vision of a more upscale Long Beach Boulevard, Virgilio had the walls stuccoed a tasteful beige. When City Hall complained that the Uzi assault rifles and pistols he sold wound up in the hands of drug-dealing gang members, he stopped selling the Israeli-made weapons.

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“I feel like I’ve been betrayed,” the gun merchant lamented. “I even sold raffle tickets for Maxcy (Filer, the city councilman). I just don’t know what they all want me to do.”

Virgilio believes that the answer is not in Compton’s intended ban of semiautomatic rifles, but in a state-imposed, 15-day waiting period for those people who wish to buy them. That way, he said, authorities can check the backgrounds of customers and restrict sales to only upstanding individuals. A similar waiting period currently is invoked for handgun purchases.

As it is now, people who wish to own rifles need only sign a form declaring that they are not convicts, drug addicts, fugitives, illegal aliens or mental patients.

Why doesn’t Virgilio impose his own waiting period on rifle buyers?

“How am I going to check you out in 15 days,” he asked. “I’m a merchant, not an arm of the law.”

In the meantime, he said, he will continue to sell assault rifles over the counter. And he apparently is selling a lot of them.

Danlo Duran, who lives in Inglewood, said through an interpreter that the AK-47 would be an ideal weapon for his father, a rancher in Mexico.

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“It won’t jam up on you,” he said.

Duran had just boxed up his purchase when another customer, carpenter Victor Naba of East Los Angeles, came in and picked out a less expensive AK-47 for himself.

“It’s a good gun, a sure gun,” Naba said as he admired the workmanship of the $309.95 weapon.

He unsheathed the bayonet and smiled.

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