People who support the right to have a gun are so inconsistent on this issue, including Donald Trump (who is mentioned in the article).<p>So let me get this straight, you think that people should have the right to carry a human-killing weapon to &quot;protect themselves&quot;, but you don&#x27;t think they should use strong encryption to protect themselves and their communications?<p>Another point of inconsistency is in regards to the argument that &quot;even if you ban guns, criminals will still use them&quot; (just like they did in Paris - twice). So if <i>guns</i> can be smuggled into a country where personal weapons are banned, you believe that the government will be able to stop <i>code</i> from passing the border?<p>The 2nd amendment defenders, or at least the people claiming they are 2nd amendment defenders, <i>should</i> be just as fanatical about defending encryption and privacy as they are about guns, because both can use the exact same arguments.<p>You can&#x27;t just defend one and attack the other. Yet, what I&#x27;m noticing is exactly that. Most of the &quot;right to own a gun&quot; defenders seem to support attacks on privacy, mass surveillance, and so on.<p>And that&#x27;s not even going into the issue that guns&#x27; <i>sole purpose</i> is to &quot;kill stuff&quot; (whether as the aggressor or the defender), while encryption is used much more for actually good or neutral stuff, not just to protect criminals. That&#x27;s only a small part of its use.<p>So guns, and weapons in general, are much more dangerous than encryption is. So if you actually defend <i>those</i> human-killing tools (yes, I know, it&#x27;s &quot;only for protection&quot;), then surely you should have many more reasons to defend encryption, not fewer.