By: E&P Staff Like many newspapers, the Palm Beach Post does not accept ads for firearms. But thanks to its news pages, a World War II veteran was able to recover from police a rare Japanese army test rifle he bought in Tokyo almost 60 years ago for a pack of smokes.
The rifle was exchanged for a retail gift card in a police progam aimed at reducing the number of firearms that might be used in crime.
The paper reported last Friday and Saturday that as a sailor in September 1945, Bruno Filippelli bought the rifle and a saber in a shop for two packs of Chesterfield cigarettes. Having left the rifle in a closet since then, Filippelli exchanged it earlier this month for a $75 Target gift card offered by police to anyone turning in a gun.
Fortunately, a gun collector who saw a photo of the rifle in the preceding Sunday edition of the Post informed Filippelli that the Arisaka Type 99 pressure test rifle was a valuable rarity. When Filippelli first asked that his rifle be returned, police refused, saying that doing so would defeat the purpose of their program. They intended to melt it down with other collected firearms or donate it to a museum.
Police relented, however, after the Post published a story about Filippelli's mistake. He even got to keep the gift card, which he'll use to buy a present for his daughter, according to the Associated Press. The Post quoted Mayor Lois Frankel saying, "It's a gift from the city for being a veteran."
With fewer than 100 ever manufactured (and maybe half of them left), the rifle was never used as a weapon, but was made to test the chamber pressure and bullet velocity for the Type 99 rifle used by Japanese soldiers.
Estimating the gun's value at $5,000, New Mexico rare-gun collector Bob Adams said police should have identified it as a test rifle and not accepted it. "That gun is history, and destroying history does not help the street crime problem," Adams told the paper.
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