Well few small questions, as I don't live in USA so I am not quite sure how things are:
a) What kind of regulations there are now about what kind of guns you can purchase?
b) What kind of ban there will/would/might come?
From outside it just seems... odd that people needs to hoard (right word?) guns and ammunitions.
Welcome to the U.S. (well, sort of).
I don't know how things are in Finland, but here in the states the right of the public to bear arms was established at the foundation of the country, and it was because the men who wrote the constitution understood that denying the public access to weapons is how many tyrannical governments keep control over their population. Banning the colonists from having weapons was one of the ways the British kept control here before we won our independence. It was so important to them that they put the law into the constitution of this nation right along with the right to free speech, the right to vote, etc...
Because of this law, and the inherent ruggedness of the population here, many, many people excersize their right to keep firearms. But some people here think that we shouldn't have that right because they think that firearms are inherently bad, evil, dangerous, or whatever, and that the only reason someone would have them is because they like violence and want to shoot people.
The problem is that statistics prove over and over again that the overwhelming majority of gun owners are very responsible with their weapons and don't cause problems. They just live out their lives and for many of them you never even know they own guns.
But of course criminals, people who would use firearms for illegal or immoral purposes, don't honor the law. So, if you pass laws that ban guns, the law abiding citizens who wouldn't do anything illegal with their guns anyway, won't have them because it's now against the law. In which case, now ONLY the bad guys, criminals, have guns that they obtained illegally in the first place. And all too many of us know that you cannot rely on the police in every bad situation. That is why we train MA or self defense in the first place.
As far as hoarding, I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you like lawn gnomes, and you have four hundred of them, are you "hoarding" them? No, you're just collecting them. While some might not understand why you would want so many lawn gnomes, or what you're going to do with them, no one would say you were evil, or bad for that. But of course lawn gnomes don't carry the same stigma with them as guns do for many people. Many of us enjoy target shooting, hunting, and other such benign shooting sports. If we happen to have a lot of guns, does that have to mean that we want to overthrow the government, or do some other bad thing with them? Of course not. We just want to do what is fun for us, and at the same time not HAVE to rely ONLY on the police if someone wants to do harm to our loved ones.
Hope this helps you to understand things here a little better...I tried to keep it as concise as possible.
