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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

Well, if you call us gun nuts, we might not respond well. Most of the folks I know who love guns are pretty protective of their other rights, but fighting constantly to keep one right does tend to drain the coffers for other causes. FreedomWorks cares quite a bit about both.

I am not fond of the EFF because they don’t win. I would gladly contribute to an NRA for encryption if it was shown the people running it would use the exact same tactics as the NRA. No prisoners, no compromise, and flag waving. It’s better to be feared than weak in politics.

As I understand it, Australia already got rid of guns, so it’s no real surprise that their government is taking more of their liberties away.

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There are an awful lot of people in the U.S. who are very committed to protecting gun rights, and are willing to vote on that issue. I don't think we've gotten to that point with crypto; it's a much newer issue, kinda geeky, way less visceral.

So the NRA collects a lot of money, targets unsupportive politicians, and can turn votes against them. The EFF has less money, and it's questionable whether ads attacking politicians for not supporting crypto would work. To the extent gun owners have bought the Republican scaremongering about terrorists, it might even backfire.

The EFF does what it can by focusing its efforts on the judicial system instead.

The legislature writes the laws. People need to make it election suicide to oppose encryption.

I won’t go down the road on your terrorist comment since it has nothing to do with the article.

My point is that the government claims it needs to break encryption to protect us from terrorists. Republicans tend to push that anti-terrorist angle pretty hard. Given that most activist gun owners are Republicans, they might not be all that supportive of cryptography.

Libertarian gun owners definitely support both gun rights and crypto, but that's a smaller group.

You can only carry out the "election suicide" strategy if you have enough popular support. Until then you're stuck with what the EFF does: education and legal action.

I think you'll find a lot of gun owners who are Republican think the party leadership is out to lunch on some issues, and frankly opinions on side issues in the party have changed multiple times. Witness a lot of the MJ debate.

> You can only carry out the "election suicide" strategy if you have enough popular support. Until then you're stuck with what the EFF does: education and legal action.

Well, education and legal action are fine things, but they will not get you to where you want. They need to get over themselves and get a booth at the next NRA convention and maybe a booth at some gun shows. A nice catch phrase linking the protection provided by gun ownership with the protection offered by encryption would be a nice bonus.

I agree with all of that, and those sound like great ideas.

If the EFF would rather not link the issues for fear of alienating some supporters, then maybe some new organization could.

There's a cultural divide here; many Australians do not consider gun ownership a "liberty" in the same way as Americans do because we do not share the same revolutionary history.

If anything in Australia's history guns were used for oppression (of Aboriginal people) and not for liberation.

Nobody got rid of guns in Australia. We removed semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns. And when I say we "removed" them, we bought them back at a fair price.

You can still own a gun in Australia. We just have a gun-averse culture, we do background checks on those who do have guns, and we have a National Firearms Agreement across all states and territories. Something I note that you don't have in the U.S. (well, some states do background checks, which is irrelevant if you buy a gun in a state that does not and move to the state that does).

You could, of course, read the Agreement yourself:

https://www.ag.gov.au/LegalSystem/Firearms/Documents/2017-na...

> I would gladly contribute to an NRA for encryption if it was shown the people running it would use the exact same tactics as the NRA.

You might be aware that, to get involved in electioneering and financial support of candidates, an "NRA for encryption" would need to have a different tax status than EFF does.

Yep (501c4 I think). That is the tax status EFF should have if they are going to do useful political action.

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