This is not the right question. It is the one they use but is not the right one.
"Do we want our citizen able to protect themselves" is the right question. And as most government have shown, they really don't want it. They want to be in charge of the protecting.
Once you see things from their perspective their position makes more sense.
From a european perspective it's so strange.
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.
Fair point. Although that still does feel weird to look at the us from Europe where guns nor anti-encryptions are popular.
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.
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.