Squinting down the sights of his rifle at the paper targets 100 yards away, yellow shooting glasses resting on his nose, Wayne Tom slowly squeezed off another round with a short but unremarkably loud bang. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Tom, shooting one of his two semiautomatic AK-47s at Irvine's South Coast Gun Club, said the weapons are "part of a collection. And they're fun to shoot."

"They're extremely accurate," said Tom, a production manager for a remodeling company who lives in Corona del Mar. "People say you can't hunt with them, but that's not true.

"They're excellent at medium range, for medium-sized game and plinking," he said, referring to shooting at objects such as cans and bottles.

Tom, like other shooters of assault weapons at the range, said the rifles add variety to his collection. "I have about a dozen guns . . . and I like all my rifles equally," he said. "These two are just something different."

To Tom Mancusi of San Pedro, shooting his American-made AR-15 assault rifle a few positions down from Wayne Tom, military assault weapons offer practicality.

"It's just a high-performance rifle," said Mancusi of his gun of choice. "It's a semiautomatic version of the military M-16, and it was meant to be abused. You can drop it, get it muddy. You don't have to baby it. Some other guns you have to clean every five rounds, but this gun was meant to have hundreds of rounds run through it."

And, he said, the AR-15's service in Vietnam--as the M-16--enhances its appeal.

"It's a little piece of history, really," he said.

When Patrick Edward Purdy walked into a Stockton schoolyard Jan. 17 and shot five children to death and wounded 29 others with a semiautomatic AK-47 rifle, he ignited a firestorm of revulsion against military assault weapons.

Within hours of the massacre, an entire nation became familiar with the Chinese-made AK-47 and, in the following days, other assault weapons such as the Israeli Uzi and the U.S. AR-15.

With recognition came outrage. On Feb. 7 the Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance barring the sale and possession of semiautomatic, military assault-type weapons. At least six more cities in the state have adopted similar laws, and at least 13 others are considering them. And throughout the country, nearly a dozen additional cities, from New Orleans to Boston, are pondering bans on assault weapons, as will the California Assembly and other state legislatures.