&gt;Encryption methods are far easier to transport and spread illegally than gun are.<p>I won&#x27;t go that far, I would say that getting a Gun in the US or even in Europe (especially since the eastern European and Balkan states have joined (officially or unofficially Schengen) is by far easier than setting up your own secure crypto from scratch.<p>This isn&#x27;t an argument in favor of banning crypto, just a hard simple truth that the number of people that can setup a secure cryptographic system is small, the amount of people that can design them is even smaller, and a single operational mistake can ruin your entire encryption.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong at this moment in time it&#x27;s &quot;fairly&quot; easy to get off the shelf (FOSS or commercial) encryption software that would prevent law enforcement from accessing the data, and it&#x27;s possible to implement encryption that would also foil full state level (intelligence agencies, military intelligence etc.) actors from breaking your crypto in any given timely manner at least.<p>But there are quite a few cutting edge attacks already on RSA, AES and other ciphers for key extraction, quite a few cryptographic systems were discovered to have horrific flaws in them, and some commercial solutions also have a backdoor&#x2F;work reducer in them for lawful (and unlawful) access.<p>That said if you currently eliminate the existing eco-system of &quot;non-backdoored &#x2F; non-broken&quot; encryption don&#x27;t expect for it to be easily revived, it will not be that hard to crush existing even FOSS crypto working groups and as time passes and agencies like the NSA can break existing encryption ciphers more easily it will only be harder and harder to build safe crypto without going into new cipher suits, and most cryptographers in the world today work for governments, or are heavily watched.<p>So the dream of having the worlds most prominent math and computer science prodigies raising up to the challenge and building new cryptography in a dusky basement of a Berlin bar is a fairly romantic fantasy.
Just look at how hard it was to get decent (for the time) encryption software when the US and most countries treated it as highly regulated commodities, and that was without an intentional crackdown on everyone who writes and distributes such software.