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Comment by newjersey | Hacker News Reader

Well, my perception of the gun lobby is that a big part of the effort is centralized. At least that's my impression after reading the nytimes article.

I don't have any insight into the gun lobby so I can't tell whether it is any accurate.

http://nytimes.com/2014/01/05/business/media/banished-for-qu...

I fear the gun argument is further weakened by the fact that civilians can't have big anti-aircraft guns in their backyard pointed towards the sky. I bet I can't operate a decent early warning radar in my backyard without running afoul of some zoning ordinance or another.

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Your perception is wrong. The gun lobby is crazyily grassroots. The NRA is demonized, but their spending in lobbying is low (their income is relatively low and they have a lot of other elements such as training and certification) and less than the gun control lobby since Bloomberg (and some silicon Valley VCs) began to lobby.

There is only one reason the NRA has influence: members and sympathizers will vote on thier recommendations, they have a lot of members and the NRA will always endorse the most sympathetic candidate to thier cause regardless of party affiliation.

The pro encryption lobby could emulate this. Lobby groups like the eff need more members and crucially need members to vote for who they recommend regardless of the candidates other views ie. vote for Trump if he said he was pro encryption.

> Lobby groups like the eff need more members and crucially need members to vote for who they recommend

EFF is a 501(c)(3) organization and is forbidden to endorse or oppose political candidates. That is different from NRA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association#Org...

They could easily spin off an entity to handle that, like the NRA does with NRA-IL. Maybe they should, or maybe another group should.

The federal government once classified encryption as a weapon, maybe we have 2nd amendments rights to it.

I think they should do something like that. The EFF fights political battles all the time, but can't recommend a "best" candidate for the issues they care about?

Because they aren't doing that is probably the reason why privacy/data protection is such a neglected issue during elections, and if it does get brought up is mainly from the perspective of "what other rights should Americans give away freely so the government can protect you".

The only reason it's been brought-up now is because of Apple, and even that is mostly spun in the government's favor in the media.

That's interesting. They've come pretty close to that line in the past...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/tea-party-taxes-and-wh...

The problem is that guns are tangible. I can have a gun, and then have the gun taken away or banned by the government. This is easy for anyone to understand.

Encryption isn't so tangible. If certain forms of encryption were banned, we'd still have our computers and phones, and to the average end user, they'd be no different in their perception.

Which is almost certainly why gun owners fight so much more vehemently for their rights than the opposition does, and for better or worse, there are people who very much espouse and believe in the "cold dead hands" mantra.

I'm a gun rights supporter, not so much because I give two hoots about guns, but because I see the fourth and second amendments as an overall proxy for the health of the bill of rights.

If the government wants to ban guns, or privacy, the remedy there is through amending the constitution, not simply pretending it doesn't exist, but we've allowed the government so much discretion and deference on matters like these, especially on guns, because we (as a people) don't particularly love them, and because the argument has historically been presented as "you don't want these bad people to have these loopholes", where bad people is interchangeably terrorists, gun owners, communists, or whatever the evil of the day tends to be.

You can certainly buy anti-aircraft guns (there are collectors of these things), but good luck getting your hands on the ammunition required to turn one from an unusual outdoor sculpture into a weapon.

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