This comment is amazing self parody.
So what, we should we let people cook up nerve gas and anthrax and build surface-to-air missile launchers in their garages, to make sure they have competitive parity with the bad guys?
And yes, people should be able to build "surface to air missile launchers" in their garages. It's called amateur rocketry, and last I checked it was quite a popular (and legal) hobby.
The vast majority of encryption is used in a lawful way to protect important things (information). The vast majority of firearms (in the USA at least) are used in a lawful way to protect, deter, as a hobby/for fun, and for sport/hunting.
They are very similar arguments, for a number of reasons, including the utter stupidity of attempting to make law-abiding citizens jump through even MORE hoops whilst accomplishing absolutely nothing in "preventing the bad guys from making use of" said technologies.
The difference is that regular people do have a need for secure communication channels. Even things other than what you typically think of as "communicating" like bill payments and shopping. Encryption is a defensive tool. It keeps people from stealing all your money.
Trying to ban strong encryption because terrorists use it is not like trying to ban nerve gases because terrorists use them. It's more like trying to ban pickup trucks because terrorists use them.
We restrict people’s use of technology in all sorts of ways to protect the basic order of society. For instance we restrict people from driving 150mph rocket cars or armored tanks with cannons on residential streets, we disallow radio jammers, we carefully regulate access to radioactive material, we don’t let unlicensed doctors implant untested medical devices, and so on.
More generally, gun control is almost entirely irrelevant to encryption. It’s an emotionally charged non sequitur which derails the discussion.
There is a huge difference between https://gmail.com type encryption and true end to end encryption. Pretending there isn't will get us nowhere. The first type is sufficient to keep out ordinary criminals, competitors, even some governments. It is not sufficient to keep out the local government itself, which can still go serve an interception order on the service provider without the target being aware of it.
The upgrade in security between true end to end crypto and user-to-service-provider crypto is essentially, that governments can no longer do that. This is a positive for avoiding 1984 style dystopias, but obviously it's rare or governments to worry about that risk (as they "know" they aren't dystopian ... and don't care to think about the future). When western governments talk about banning encryption, the only type they are really talking about is the type where they can't go to some big corporation and get the data when they want it. And that type is still pretty rare. Actually almost nobody uses it.
If we allow a ban on secure end-to-end encryption, are we setting ourselves up for a future government to go back and demand access to everything we've ever done? Do I want to have somebody in 2060 datamining my entire life? It's worrying to me.
Short of putting better end-to-end encryption everywhere, I'm not sure how we prevent that. As you say, that sort of encryption is pretty uncommon, so maybe this is what we're headed toward either way. I think it's worrying.
But I'm not an expert on cryptography. Are there are other solutions?
Secure communication does not kill other people, it protects yourself. We should allow everyone to have that because by taking it away the only thing we will do is harm law abiding people.