Sea Change

Gun sales, especially semi-automatic gun sales, have skyrocketed since the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States.

The definition of a semi-automatic weapon is a weapon that uses the expanding gas from a fired round to drive another round into the chamber, allowing the trigger to be squeezed until the ammunition runs out, without the user pausing to manually insert another bullet.

With the recent Supreme Court ruling that struck down the Washington, D.C., handgun ban, the laws governing gun control swung hard to the right, immediately before the political system as a whole swung left. The fear on many gun aficionados' minds is that the new administration will do its best to ban the guns they love so much.

In the past month, requests for background checks from gun merchants have risen 15 percent. This is up from an 8 percent increase over 2007 in October. A whole lot more guns are in civilian hands than would have been if, for example, John McCain had won.

The truth remains that guns don't kill people, people kill people. Whether or not certain forms of firearm are banned won't change that fact. All it means if semi-automatic weapons are banned is that the bullet that kills a person came out of a single-or-double-action handgun. That person is still dead.

Still, the second amendment should not be used to justify the ownership of a semi-automatic firearm. Remember that when that amendment was penned, guns were more similar to clubs that fired lead balls than a modern firearm.

But modern weapons technology is another demon out of Pandora's box. If we ban semi-automatic weapons, only criminals will have them. Anyone can get anything they want in this world, if they have the cash.

Maybe, in the spirit of change, the Obama administration should try making firearms education mandatory for every citizen, simply to prevent the accidents that have become part of our national landscape.

About thirty thousand people died from gunshot wounds in 2004, the most recent year whose figures have been tallied. We've gone back and forth banning and allowing certain weapons for decades, fetishizing them and then making them as plentiful as candy. If anything, this behavior exacerbates our problem with guns. Maybe it's time to really do something different.

Change. It doesn't have to mean a simple swing left.