ORLANDO, Fla. -- It took us 38 minutes to walk out of a gun shop with a death machine.

Just two days after Omar Mateen used a semi-automatic rifle to murder 49 innocent people and injure dozens more, we were able to purchase an AR-15 -- a rifle similar to Mateens that has been used in several other mass shootings on American soil -- in less time than it takes to buy a cart full of groceries.

We would have been locked and loaded within five minutes, but the gun shop employee we spoke to said the queue on background checks was longer than usual because people were scrambling to buy AR-15s in the wake of the shooting. Thats both terrifying and unsurprising -- gun sales often skyrocket after mass shootings.

But the ease with which we purchased our AR-15, a Vietnam-era gun hailed by the military as being the perfect killing machine , was surreal. This, despite the fact that Florida Gov. Rick Scott had declared a state of emergency in Orange County, which includes Orlando.

On any given day, regardless of whether your town has endured a horrific tragedy, its not hard to purchase a weapon of mass murder like we did in most of America. A reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News was able to get one in just seven minutes in Pennsylvania on Monday.

Within seconds, we had it in our hands: A rifle that weighs less than a small watermelon and can, like the MCX Sig Sauer that Mateen used, easily fire several dozen rounds in less than 10 seconds. Our Diamondback DB15 's killing power is striking, and at $644, its a relatively affordable murder weapon.