Despite living in the U.S. my entire life—including a four-year stint in the Midwest—I had never, not once, ever touched a gun until last week.

I'm terrified of them. Everyone talks about how the  media desensitizes kids to violence, but I think growing up on Terminator and True Lies made me more wary of guns: If there's one in the room, it means SOMEONE IS GOING TO DIE. I still can't wrap my head around why it's acceptable for someone to walk into a store and buy a semi-automatic any day of the week.

Last week, I was trolling around pawn shops in the rough part of town interviewing people for a freelance assigment about how the recession has affected business. Hawker's Lockers is next to a derelict parking lot and a chain link fence lined with razor wire. After I toured the back of the store where guitars were stacked like pancakes, the chatty young woman behind the counter, Cassie, started talking to me about guns. She loves them.

While some reports say gun sales spiked dramatically around the Obama election, the Hawkers Lockers workers say they haven't noticed any big increase. "A few weeks ago, though,” Cassie told me, “I was at Dutch brothers and the coffee guy started asking me about where I work.” (She told him about the pawn shop, and obviously, the guns.) "He said he wanted to buy a gun before the 'Barackolypse'!"

I asked Cassie to show me her favorite gun in the store. The walls and counters were lined with rifles and handguns, but Cassie headed straight to the back and brought out a $1200 semi-automatic Bushmaster. "I was that little redneck girl who just liked guns," she explained, looking over the huge gun and then handing it to me. Oh geez.

Photo by  Scott Toepler

"Can this be like a hunting gun?" I asked. Cassie and the other worker, an older guy named William, laughed. "That's not an animal gun!" William said.

"What's the totally legitimate, non-gang-banger reason for owning one of these?" I asked, my finger on the trigger.

Cassie shrugged. "There isn't one."

The pair got a kick out of my gun jitters and a minute later, I looked up and William was aiming a fancy sniper gun at me—a red laser sight beam dancing over my sweater.

"You see that dot on you?" William laughed. Very funny.