But it's funny that the US is so adament about being able to defend yourself with guns. But with software it's a debate. And it seems that often, the people for guns are against encryption and vice versa.

From a european perspective it's so strange.

The metaphorical person on the street can wrap their head around why having a gun in a person's hand gives that person power. Everyone basically knows that the gun control debate is a debate about who has and is allowed to have power.

I'm not sure the metaphorical person on the street even knows encryption exists; if they do, it's only very vague and probably an entirely incorrect understanding of it.

As for people who are for one and not the other, even though I'm personally in favor of both the second amendment and encryption in the hands of people, it's not hard to see a meaningful difference between them that would make it reasonable to have differing opinions. Guns in the hands of the populace is a positive power to do harm, encryption in the hands of the populace is strictly defensive. Criminals can use encryption to defend things we'd rather not have defended, but that is fundamentally a different concern that criminals using guns to attack things we'd rather not have attacked.

I think the only weird case would be being in favor of gun rights but thinking the government should have back door access to encryption, on the part of someone who deeply understands both. That is to say, I'm sure you can find people who believe both those things, but I suspect the latter is mostly an un-thought-out instinctive reaction to generally trust authority figures who seem generally trustworthy to them combined with a lot of ignorance about what encryption is and how it works. Humans have an all-but-instinctual understanding of physical weapons, encryption is basically magic by comparison.

> Humans have an all-but-instinctual understanding of physical weapons, encryption is basically magic by comparison.

Fair point. Although that still does feel weird to look at the us from Europe where guns nor anti-encryptions are popular.

Doesn't seem odd to me, the government has bigger and more guns at their disposal and that's the situation they want with encryption too.

they have had cases where criminals basically handed them the case by not encrypting their storage. then they run into a case where the criminal had encrypted all of their storage and they have zero access to the data. They are basically that they want to force people not to be careful with their data so they can expose their entire with a simple court document. They don't want to have to do real police work.

Members of congress aren't pro "defend yourself with guns," they are pro "get votes of people who are pro defend yourself with guns."

Does that distinction matter?

It absolutely matters. If a politician is just paying lip-service to a principle, he's definitely not going to fight for it. He's just going to do what he wants to do, and try to give the appearance of caring about the issue.

The person who actually believes what he espouses will actually work for that goal.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of politicians are the former rather than the latter, hence the popular perjorative "RINO". Maybe there's a similar thing on the Democrat side, but I can't think of one right now.

It provides context to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sametmax 's confusion.

Yes. That specific difference is the classic vector to corruption, bribery and selling out.

> From a european perspective it's so strange.

Agreed. To me, it seems that encryption should be uncontroversially accepted from the populations's standpoint, while gun policies have valid arguments for and against.

Basically: it's really hard to shoot someone in the face with pgp.

Obligatory XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/504/